Opportunistic gains of mobility in cellular data networks

In this paper, we assess the performance gains of mobility on the downlink of cellular data networks. These gains are only due to the elastic nature of traffic and thus observed even under a blind, fair scheduling scheme: data are more likely transmitted when users are close to the base stations, in good radio conditions. This phenomenon is further amplified by opportunistic scheduling schemes that exploit multi-user diversity. The results are based on the analysis of flow-level traffic models and validated by system-level simulations.