Performance Analysis of Fair Channel Sharing Policies in an Integrated Cellular Voice/Data Network

We study channel sharing in an integrated cellular voice/data network with a finite queue for data call requests that cannot be served immediately upon arrival. Using analytical techniques, a comparison of different fair channel sharing policies is made. As a main result, a closed-form expression is derived for the expected sojourn time (waiting time plus transfer time) of a data call, conditional on its size, indicating that the sojourn time is proportional to the call size. This attractive proportionality result establishes an additional fairness property for the channel sharing policies proposed in the paper. Additionally, as a valuable intermediate result, the conditional expected sojourn time of an admitted data call is obtained, given the system state at arrival, which may serve as an appreciated feedback information service to the data source. An extensive numerical study is included to compare the proposed policies and to obtain insight in the performance effects of the various system and policy parameters.