Handover Performance: Propagation and Traffic Issues

Efficient handoff is very important for cellular mobile communication systems because the number of handoffs increases with the smaller cell sizes needed for high capacity systems. Propagation, traffic, switching and processing are all important issues in assessing handoff performance, and most of the past performance studies have focussed on only one of these issues.In this paper, we discuss various issues related to handoff performance and the interdependency of these issues by carrying out investigations on a combined platform. In particular, we consider handover strategies, signal strength prediction schemes, handover priority schemes and handoff priority level assignment schemes. It is shown that individually optimised solutions will not provide the optimum solution in the combined system, and the need for investigations in an integrated environment is emphasised.