Performance Sensitivity to the HighOrder Statistics of Time Interval Variables in Cellular Networks Cell dwell time (DT) and unencumbered interruption time (IT) are fundamental time interval variables in the teletraffic analysis for the performance evaluation of mobile cellular networks. Although a diverse set of general distributions has been proposed to model these time interval variables, the effect of their moments higher than the expected value on system performance has not been reported in the literature. In this paper, sensitivity of teletraffic performance metrics of mobile cellular networks to the first three standardized moments of both DT and IT is investigated in a comprehensive manner. Mathematical analysis is developed considering that both DT and IT are phasetype distributed random variables. This work includes substantial numerical results for quantifying the dependence of system level performance metrics to the values of the first three standardized moments of both DT and IT. For instance, for a high mobility scenario where DT is modeled by a hyperErlang distribution, we found that call forced termination probability decreases around 60% as the coefficient of variation (CoV) and skewness of DT simultaneously change from 1 to 20 and from 60 to 2, respectively. Also, numerical results confirm that as link unreliability increases the forced termination probability increases while both new call blocking and handoff failure probabilities decrease. Numerical results also indicate that for low values of skewness, performance metrics are highly sensitive to changes in the CoV of either the IT or DT. In general, it is observed that system performance is more sensitive to the statistics of the IT than to those of the DT. Such understanding of teletraffic engineering issues is vital for planning, designing, dimensioning, and optimizing mobile cellular networks.

Joint User Association and Resource Allocation in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks: Comparison of Two Modeling Approaches The performance of different combinations of user association (UA) and resource allocation (RA) in heterogeneous cellular networks has been extensively studied using a classic modeling approach based on system snapshots. There have been also many studies focusing on the dynamics of the system using queueing models. These modeling approaches are rarely compared with each other though they each bring different insights to the design problem. In this paper, we consider a queueing modelbased approach to study the interplay of UA and RA, and compare the results to those obtained using snapshot models. Specifically, we formulate three different joint UA and RA optimization problems corresponding to the following three performance metrics: the maximum achievable arrival rate, the average system delay, and the maximum peruser delay. These problems are nonconvex integer programs. We have therefore developed numerical techniques to compute either their exact solutions or tight lower bounds. We obtain results for different combinations of RA and UA schemes, and compare the trends with those obtained via the snapshot approach. The trends on RA are very similar, which we take as a crossvalidation of the two modeling approaches for this kind of problem. The trends on user association are somewhat different which indicates a lack of robustness of the results and the need for a careful validation of UA models.