Impact of Signaling Load on the UMTS Call Blocking/Dropping

Radio resources in the Third Generation (3G) Wireless Cellular Networks (WCNs) such as the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) network is limited in term of soft capacity. The quality of a signaling service transmission depends on various factors (i.e., location, speed, and the environment of the user, power control, and variable data rate requirement), and has impact on quality of user data communications where the opposite order is also true. In this paper, the authors provide the first step to evaluate the impact that various signaling service types have on call blocking and ongoing call drop in the UMTS systems.