A Generic Framework for Mobility Modeling and Performance Analysis in Next-Generation Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Integration of different wireless radio cellular technologies is emerging as an effective approach to accommodate the increasing demand of next-generation multimedia-based applications. In such systems user roaming among different technologies, commonly known as vertical handoff, will significantly affect different aspects of network design and planning due to the characteristically wide-ranging diversity in access technologies and supported applications. Hence, the development of new mobility models that accurately depict vertical mobility is crucial for studying different design problems in these heterogeneous systems. This article presents a generic framework for mobility modeling and performance analysis of integrated heterogeneous networks using phase-type distributions. This framework realizes all modeling requirements in next-generation user mobility including accuracy, analytical tractability, and accommodating the correlation between different residence times within different access technologies. Additionally, we present general guidelines to evaluate application performance based on the new mobility models introduced in this article. We show the accuracy of our modeling approach through simulation and analysis given different applications.