Modeling and performance analysis for mobile cognitive radio cellular networks

In this paper, teletraffic performance and channel holding time characterization in mobile cognitive radio cellular networks (CRCNs) under fixed-rate traffic with hard-delay constraints are investigated. To this end, a mathematical model to capture the effect of interruption of ongoing calls of secondary users (SUs) due to the arrival of primary users (PUs) is proposed. The proposed model relies on the use of an independent potential interruption time associated with the instant of possible interruption for each ongoing call in every visited cell. Then, a Poisson process is used to approximate the secondary users’ call interruption process due to the arrival of PUs. Based on this model and considering that unencumbered service time (UST) and cell dwell time (CDT) of SUs are independent generally distributed random variables, analytical formulae for both the probability distributions of channel holding times and inter-cell handoff attempts rate are derived. Also, a novel approximated closed-form mathematical expression for call forced termination probability of SUs is derived under the restriction that the UST is exponentially distributed. Additionally, by considering all the involved time variables exponentially distributed and employing fractional channel reservation to prioritize intra- and inter-cell handoff call attempts over new call requests, a queuing analysis to evaluate the call-level performance of CRCNs in terms of the maximum Erlang capacity is developed. The accuracy of our proposed mathematical models is extensively investigated under a variety of different evaluation scenarios for all the considered call-level performance metrics. Numerical results demonstrate that channel holding time statistics are highly sensitive to both interruption probability of ongoing secondary calls and type of probability distribution functions used to model CDT and UST. From the teletraffic perspective, numerical results reveal that the system Erlang capacity largely depends on the relative value of the mean secondary service time to the mean primary service time and the primary channels’ utilization factor. Also, the obtained results show that there exists a critical utilization factor of the primary resources from which it is no longer possible to guarantee the required quality of service of SUs and, therefore, services with hard-delay constraints cannot be even supported in CRCNs.