Competitive Analysis of Handoff Rerouting Algorithms

Personal Communication Systems (PCS) enable people and devices to communicate independently of their location and while moving from place to place. For providing continuous communication to mobile users every PCS network employs a mobility management composed of two components, location management and handoff management In contrast to the telephone number in traditional telecommunication systems that specifies the location of the end user, the PCS subscriber number does not provide the location of the mobile user. Therefore, the system must maintain a location management mechanism for locating mobile users. This mechanism maps subscriber numbers to the current location of the requested users for call delivery operations. The handoff management enables the PCS network to maintain sessions with mobile users while they change their attach pints with the system’s infrastructure. Such changes are called handoff or handover operations [8,30]. In this chapter we consider only rerouting algorithms for supporting handoff oprations can be found in [6,30,33]. In our discussion we consider only intercell handoff operations that result from user movements to new cells1 that include actions at both the wireless level and the network infrastructure.