Cellular Telephone Systems: Queueing, Blocking and Guardbands

Abstract

In this talk, we consider a service system having a finite number of servers and two classes of traffic, which arrive to the system according to independent Poisson processes. The service system has a guardband, which is a specified number of idle servers below which access will not be granted to the lower priority customers. Newly arriving lower priority customers join a finite queue if the number of servers available at the time of their arrival is less than the guardband. Meanwhile, the higher priority call requests are granted immediate service unless all servers are busy, in which case the call is dropped. We present a simple, novel approach to solving for the equilibrium probabilities for the number of lower priority calls in the queue. Additionally, we discuss blocking probabilities and other quantities of interest as a function of system parameters through the use of numerical examples.