Modeling and design of next-generation heterogeneous wireless networks

The service integration of different wireless access technologies is envisioned as a viable approach to accommodate the expected increase in the demand on wireless resources. This vision originates a new networking paradigm that introduces a new vertical mobility dimension, which significantly magnifies the mobility impact on the system performance and creates new challenging design issues that necessitate adopting novel innovative approaches to handle the inherent system heterogeneity.;In a complementary research direction, we studied vertical mobility management in heterogeneous systems. The asymmetric nature of vertical mobility is a novel design challenge that invalidates the traditional handoff decision mechanisms, which are based on comparing the signal strength from different base Stations of the same network. Hence, the vertical handoff decision should adopt novel mechanisms that consider a predetermined set of user preferences and network design goals. Consequently, we developed a novel flexible vertical handoff approach that, can adapt to different operating parameters such as, user mobility, required handoff delay, and different application requirements.;Clearly, vertical mobility is completely dismissed in the current mobility models that are primarily developed for homogeneous cellular systems. Hence, the development of new mobility models that consider vertical mobility in heterogeneous systems evolves as a crucial requirement for proper system design and performance evaluation. These models should satisfy general mobility modeling requirements such as flexibility and analytical tractability. More importantly, they should accommodate the correlation between the mobile terminal (MT) cell residence time (CRT) and the durations spent by the MT under the umbrellas of different technological coverage cocktails. In this dissertation, we developed a novel CRT mobility modeling framework that realizes the aforementioned modeling requirements. This framework is used to develop mobility models for two-tier and n-tier heterogeneous systems. Based on these models, we developed generic performance evaluation frameworks to estimate several salient performance metrics. Additionally, we employed the developed mobility modeling and performance evaluation frameworks to study several interesting network planning and dimensioning problems.