The paper deals with the evaluation of performance of current cellular systems which are required to accommodate in an already operating system a wide range of new services, with different quality requirements (on delays, retransmission rates, etc.), and often characterised by a high burstiness (i. e. with relatively short traffic bursts, interleaved by comparatively long silence periods). To this end, an extension of packet communications is appealing for its inherent flexibility; standardisation of packet protocols for data transmission over idle GSM channels is in progress, and a similar service exploiting AMPS radio and network resources is already specified as Cellular Digital Packet Data. In both cases voice traffic retains a higher priority. The paper focuses on the evaluation of the effect of this additional traffic on existing voice traffic in a GSM Phase 2+ system. Although voice calls experience the same channel availability, their performance are worsened by the higher co-channel interference due to the higher average channel occupancy. This impairment cannot be tackled, as a matter of course, by increasing the re-use distance as this would affect the overall system capacity. The paper suggests the use of smart planning strategies capable to ease control of interference levels with a negligible impact on system complexity and signalling load.

Next generation personal communication systems will provide a range of different services to moving users. In parallel, packet switching is being proposed as a way to statistical multiplexing and hence to better resource exploitation. The co-existence of different services may prove difficult due to the different requirements on quality of service parameters like packet loss, delay, and so on. This requires a careful design of Call Admission Control policies, which are to be quite different from those used in fixed network, due to two phenomena which are typical of mobile systems, namely co-channel interference and handovers. In this paper we address these complex topics, and propose some basic rules for Call Admission Control policies suitable in this context.

The paper deals with the evaluation of channel allotment criteria in a mixed cellular environment composed by a regular grid of macrocells, plus a number of microcells deployed in the most congested areas. The optimum allotment of the resources between microcells and macrocells, which is a key issue for future personal communication systems, has to be tailored on the basis of their different functionalities. The approach is quite innovative since the analysis is carried out considering real traffic statistics, which are characterised by peaks and fluctuations resulting in uneven traffic loads on different cells. Different propagation models for macrocells and microcells have been adopted. Finally, the impact of the allotment of frequency resources to microcells and macrocells is analysed.

Packet Reservation Multiple Access (PRMA) is emerging as a possible multiple access scheme for the forth-coming Personal Communication systems, due to its inherent flexibility and to its capability to exploit silence periods to perform a statistical multiplexing of traffic sources, often characterised by a high burstiness. On the other hand, the current trend in reducing cell sizes and the more complex traffic scenarios pose major planning problems, which are best coped with by adaptive allocation schemes. The identification of adaptive schemes suitable to operate on a shorter time scale, which is typical of packetised information, disclose a number of problems which are addressed in this paper. A viable solution is provided by a well-known self-adaptive assignment method (Channel Segregation), originally developed for FDMA systems, provided it is conveniently adapted for PRMA operation. Simulations show good performance, provided that values of some system variables are correctly chosen. These results encourage further studies in order to refine adaptive methods suitable for cellular, packet switched personal communications systems.