Study of mobile communications with a complex underlying user network

Abstract

In the traditional study of mobile cellular systems,all users are assumed to have the same behaviour: they have the same probability of making/receiving a call,and they will move around the network with identical mobility.Moreover,the underlying user network is assumed to be fully connected,implying that all users know each other and they will communicate with each other with the same probability.In a practical environment, each user has a different list of acquaintances including relatives,friends and colleagues,with whom the user is most likely to make contact,and the size of the list varies with individual users.In addition,different users will acquire different levels of mobility,depending on various factors such as job or age.To evaluate the performance of a mobile cellular system more realistically,we model the user network with a scale-free network in which the number of acquaintances of a user follows a power-law distribution.Moreover,the mobile system is studied under three user mobility distributions:zero mobility,identical mobility and power-law mobility.Finally,the system performance indicators,such as the carried traffic and the blocking probabilities,are evaluated based on computer simulations,which show that both the user network configuration and the mobility of users affect the performance of the mobile system.