Cell dimensioning under general user mobility

Although, all the users within a cellular network are not stationary, the current cellular network design has as the fundamental assumption exactly this immobility of the users, resulting in treating them as their fixed wireline counterparts. However, cellular networks are quite different primarily because of the phenomenon of handover. This paper builds on the assumption of the Poissonian nature of the handover traffic and produces a set of formulae which give the mean number of performed handovers during a call and the mean channel holding time, in order to examine how the cell dimensioning procedure is affected by taking into consideration the mobility of the users. The results show that in general a cell experiences a lower load compared to the stationary load, which means that the stationary assumption results in overestimated traffic. Lastly, a network dimensioning methodology is presented, where moving traffic and mixed (stationary and moving) traffic and also quality of service guarantees for handed-over calls are taken into consideration.