Performance evaluation of multipath cellular networks in obstacle mobility model for downlink packet video communication

Obstacles present in the line of sight transmission path of a wireless signal severely attenuates the received signal power. Extreme fluctuations of the received signal power caused by shadowing can create "blind spots". Blind spots are areas within the cellular coverage area from where no communication is possible to the base station (BS). For single path packet based services link failures results in total loss of communication. The problem of link failure and blind spots can almost be eliminated in the recently proposed multipath cellular architecture (MCA) which provisions up to three different communication links from the mobile node (MN) to three adjacent BSs through overlapped coverage. Voice and/or multimedia packet delivery can thus benefit by establishing communication from the best interface in terms of received signal power. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of the multi-path MCA model in reducing link failure and blind spot communication problems in presence of multiple obstacles and shadow fading. Obstacle mobility model is utilized as the preferred user mobility model. Video transmission performance improves significantly in terms of reduced packet loss and improved reproduced signal quality at the receiver for the multipath MCA model compared to the existing single path cellular network architectur