Composite performance and availability analysis of wireless communication networks

With the increasing popularity of wireless communication systems, customers are expecting the same level of service, availability, and performance from the wireless communication networks as the traditional wire-line networks. The traditional pure performance model that ignores failure and recovery but considers resource contention generally overestimates the system's ability to perform a certain job. On the other hand, pure availability analysis tends to be too conservative since performance considerations are not taken into account. To obtain realistic composite performance and availability measures, one should consider performance changes that are associated with failure recovery behavior. A review is first given over the advances in composite performance and availability analysis. Thereafter, three techniques for composite performance and availability analysis are discussed in detail through a queueing system in a wireless communication network. Numerical results show that an approximate model based on a framework originally proposed by Bobbie and Trivedi (1990) provides remarkably accurate predictions on system performance.