Performance evaluation of a tree-based rerouting architecture in a wireless local access network

The enormous increase in wireless communications has led to the need to configure wireless access networks with cellular structures based on the use of micro- and picocells. A key issue in connection with this is the rerouting of the data flow directed to a user making a handover. The paper considers one of the most widely-used connectionless protocols, the signaling network layer (SNL), which is based on a tree-structured routing architecture. Through an analytical model based on a queueing network, its performance is analyzed in terms of the distribution of the rerouting delay. The proposed model is then applied to a case study to demonstrate its versatility and manageability and to get important insights to the dimensioning of the routing architecture.