Evaluation of Teletraffic in Cellular Communication Systems Using Multi-Connections for Soft Handoff

Noriteru SHINAGAWA
Takehiko KOBAYASHI
Keisuke NAKANO
Masakazu SENGOKU

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences   Vol.E83-A    No.7    pp.1318-1327
Publication Date: 2000/07/25
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8508
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Multi-dimensional Mobile Information Networks)
Category: 
Keyword: 
mobile communication,  soft-handoff,  traffic characteristic,  CDMA,  micro cell,  

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Summary: 
To implement soft handoff in cellular communication systems that employ code division multiple access (CDMA), it is necessary to establish communication lines between the switch and multiple base stations and distribute the communication data via these multi-connections to the base stations simultaneously. This means that, when soft handoff is performed with the same amount of communication line resources as hard handoff, the blocking probability is higher than for hard handoff, and service quality is thus worse. Furthermore, handoffs occur more frequently as the size of cells becomes smaller, and this increases the probability of forced terminations. Switches must be endowed with greater processing capacity to accommodate the more frequent handoffs. The use of the queuing handoff method can be expected, in general, to mitigate forced termination probability compared with the immediate handoff method. In this regard, we propose a prioritized queuing handoff method that gives priority to fast-moving mobile stations (MSs) as a way to mitigate forced terminations even more than the non-priority queuing method without appreciably increasing the processing load. We then compare the traffic characteristics of our proposed method with these of three other methods in micro cell systems--immediate method, non-priority queuing method, and conventional hard handoff method without multi-connections--by computer simulation. Here, considering that the proposed method gives priority to fast-moving calls, traffic characteristics for these methods were evaluated separately for slow- and fast-moving MSs. The results reveal that proposed method can reduce the forced termination probability and total call failure probability more than non-priority queuing method without having an appreciable impact on slow-moving calls.