Handoff Performance Improvement with Latency Reduction in Next Generation Wireless Networks

The next generation (NG) wireless networks are expected to provide mobile users with the real-time multimedia services. High sensitivity to time constraints like delay and jitter is one of the important characteristics of the multimedia traffic. In order to maintain a certain quality of service (QoS) level, the handoff latency should be minimized. Furthermore, if the new cell is not ready at the actual handoff time, the handoff call may be even forced terminated. Hence, the handoff preparation latency directly affects the performance of the cellular networks in terms of QoS support and the handoff blocking probability. In this paper, we present the expected visitor list (EVL) method to achieve reduced handoff blocking probability and maintain a certain QoS level in the network by minimizing handoff preparation latency. The handoff signaling decomposition is introduced to make the neighbor cells aware of the resource demands and QoS requirements of the mobile terminal before the actual handoff time. The obtained information about the prospective active mobile terminal is stored in an EVL entry at the neighbor cells. The call admission control (CAC) with QoS-provisioning is run against each EVL entry. According to the CAC result, the network preparation algorithms are executed and the results are stored in the entry. No resource reservation or allocation is performed in advance, and the varying network conditions are reflected to validity and admission status of the entries. The results of handoff preparation algorithms stored in the EVL entry are activated at the actual handoff time and hence the handoff latency is minimized. Performance evaluation through mathematical analysis and extensive simulation experiments show that the EVL method reduces handoff latency and hence handoff call blocking probability significantly without introducing high overhead.