Effect of bursty traffic on the performance of heterogeneous access networks

Heterogeneous access networks are expected to be a combination of multiple access technologies which integrate with each other to offer ubiquitous connectivity to the user equipments. Current studies on the design of heterogeneous access networks does not take into account bursty traffic that can lead to a serious degradation of network performance. In this paper we study the effect of bursty traffic on the performance of heterogeneous access networks. We represent the traffic of any cell by the N-burst traffic model. We apply different loads to study the effect of offloading on the performance of the heterogeneous access network. In particular, we used NS-3 simulator to examine the network behavior when some parts of network service areas are populated by bursty traffic. In the simulation, the average throughput, delay, jitter, packet loss, and number of requests are analyzed to capture the network behavior under bursty traffic loads.