Optimal call control strategies in a cellular mobile communication system with a buffer for new calls

The demand of large capacity in coming cellular systems makes inevitable the deployment of small cells, rendering more frequent handoff occurrences of calls than in the conventional system. The key issue is then how effectively to reduce the chance of unsuccessful handoffs, since the handoff failure is less desirable than that of a new call attempt. In this study, we consider the control policies which give priority to handoff calls by limiting channel assignment for the originating new calls, and allow queueing the new calls which are rejected at their first attempts. On this system, we propose the problem of finding an optimal call control strategy which optimizes the objective function value, while satisfying the requirements on the handoff/new call blocking probabilities and the new call delay. The objective function takes the most general form to include such well-known performance measures as the weighted average carried traffic and the handoff call blocking probability. The problem is formulated into two different linear programming (LP) models. One is based on the direct employment of steady state equations, and the other uses the theory of semi-Markov decision process. Two LP formulations are competitive with each other, each having its own strength in the numbers of variables and constraints. Extensive experiments are also conducted to show which call control strategy is optimal under various system environments having different objective functions and traffic patterns.