CATV-Based Personal Communications Network: The Architectures and Handoff Schemes

The cable TV (CATV) network is an ideal backbone for PCS due to its prevalent and broadcast nature. This significantly reduces the implementation costs and the handoff overheads. This paper proposes two architectures for the CATVbased PCS system. In the first architecture, each base station is equipped with multiple fixed receivers to provide fast and seamless handoffs for mobile users. Nevertheless, the hardware cost for this implementation is relative expensive. To overcome this, in the second architecture, each base station is equipped with only one tunable receiver. This simple and economic architecture suffers from the possibility of offset conflict when mobile terminals handoff between cells. Three offset assignment algorithms based on the concepts of random assignment, neighbor usage, and clustering, respectively are proposed to solve the offset conflict problem. Simulation results indicate the one with the concept of clustering performs much better than the other two schemes in terms of offset conflict probability. key words: CATV network, hando , PCS, wireless access