Radio Resource Management in MBMS Enabled 3G Mobile Cellular Networks: A New Handover Control Approach

Radio Resource Management (RRM) algorithms are needed to guarantee Quality of Service (QoS), to maintain the planned coverage area, and to offer high capacity. The family of RRM algorithms can be divided into Handover Control, Power Control, Admission Control, Load Control and Packet Scheduling functionalities. Using the existing RRM algorithms in 3rd Generation (3G) Cellular Networks supporting multicast and broadcast multimedia services (MBMS) might prove inefficient due to the new aspects introduced. Here, we focus our research on Handover Control. We investigate and highlight the inefficiencies caused when a mobile terminal is receiving an MBMS service and performs a handover using the existing Handover Control approach. We therefore propose and evaluate a specific MBMS Handover approach to compensate for the issues highlighted in our analysis. In this paper, using a different approach, we extend previous work to Non-homogeneous cell boundaries and Non-Line of Sight transmission.