Traffic Analysis of a Mobile Communication System Based on a Scale-Free User Network

In the traditional study of mobile cellular systems, all users are assumed to have the same behaviour. They have the same probability of making/receiving a call and they will move around the network with identical mobility. Moreover, the underlying user network is assumed to be fully connected. In a practical environment, each user has a different list of acquaintances including relatives, friends and colleagues, with whom the user will make contact. Also, the size of the list varies with individual users. In addition, depending on various factors such as job nature, different users will acquire different levels of mobility. To evaluate the performance of a mobile cellular system more realistically in this paper, we model the user network with a scale-free network in which the number of acquaintances of a user follows a power-law distribution.