In a cellular system for mobile communications, every service area is divided into a number of cells for utilizing the frequency spectrum efficiently. Service areas for such systems are two dimensional, however, the analysis of the characteristics of the communication traffic for the areas are quite complicated, since the motion of the vehicles in the area can not be predicted precisely. For making the analysis easily, the areas are assumed to be band-shaped like a highway. Furthermore, in the analysis, the traffic offered to a cell is assumed to be stationary. In actual systems, the density of vehicles and the offered communication traffic is not stationary, so that many differences exist between the analysis and the actual systems. This paper presents an analysis method using state equations. The equations represent the transient characteristics of mobile communication traffic when a band-shaped service area is assumed. The transition is made by accidents or congestion, and causes the rapid offered traffic change in a communication system. In the method, numerical analysis is made under the consideration of "handoff" operation. The operation consists of surrendering the channel used in the previous cell and reassigning a new channel when the vehicle crosses the cell boundary. The analytical results are compared with the simulations, and the two results show good agreement. The method presented in this paper can be used for designing the switching system when the offered traffic changes rapidly due to accidents or congestion.

We investigated performance improvement in a cellular system by introducing direct communication between terminals. Previous research has indicated that direct communication efficiently uses channels; however, this is not always so. We studied two factors that affect how much efficiency improves. One is the distribution of terminals. We defined some typical distributions with localization of terminals and analyzed how the difference between the distributions affected the performance improvement by direct communication. Another factor is the mobility of terminals, because mobility shortens the length of time during which terminals are directly connected. We analyzed how mobility affected performance improvement by direct communication. For the analyses, we used some theoretical techniques.