Effects of User Behaviour on GSM Air Interface Performance

Abstract

The behaviour of user when accessing the services offered by the GSM network has an impact on the performance of the network particularly at the air interface. A good understanding of user behavior and its impact on network performance is therefore of paramount concern to the network planning engineer. In this paper a model is developed based on the multi-agent paradigm for the study of user behavior and its impact on the blocking probability at the air interface. Aspects of user behavior studied are the flashing phenomenon and the effects of variations in mean call duration for a given traffic load per user. The effect of encouraging users to modify their behaviour through feedback under high load situations is also studied. The study revealed that, making modifications to the tariffs by encouraging longer talk time in preference to several short calls or flashing and the use of feedback to customers did not only improve perceived but also real network performance.