Performance modeling and design trade-offs of wireless communication networks with heterogeneous service requirements

In this dissertation we study several wireless communication networks with different service requirements. Our approach is to first develop performance models, either analytical or simulation, for the wireless communication network of interest and then investigate the trade-offs between the system performance and various network control schemes.; For mobile data networks employing the slotted ALOHA protocol, we present an analytical model that can be used to investigate the fairness issue which arises due to the near-far effect, taking into account the effect of the physical layer parameters such as channels, modulation and coding. The performance of two retransmission control policies are evaluated and compared. The impact of the propagation effects of mobile radio channels on the single user and network performance is studied by a simulation model where four fading channels are implemented and their performance is compared.; For distributed packet radio networks with hard real-time requirements, we define a system reliability measure and analyze the performance of the reservation ALOHA protocol. Both the worst-case scenario and the steady-state scenario are studied by Markovian models and simulation. Various trade-offs between the system performance and the system parameters such as channel data rate, packet error rate, etc. are investigated.; For wireless CDMA networks supporting integrated voice/video/data services, we propose a set of interface parameters that summarize the effect of physical layer parameters and develop markovian models for the integrated traffic to study the performance of various congestion control policies. The performance under different types of feedback information and the effects of various system parameters is investigated by the proposed model. The congestion control policies allow data traffic to fully utilize the channel capacity while guaranteeing the quality of service of voice and video.