Performance Analysis of Channel-barrowing Hand-off Scheme in CDMA Cellular Systems

For cellular communication systems, mobility and limited radio coverage of a cell require calls to be handed over from one Base Station System (BSS) to another. Due to the limited band width available in various cells, there is a finite probability that an ongoing call, while being handed off, may get dropped. Minimizing the dropping of ongoing calls during hand off is an important design criterion. Some digital cellular systems, e.g., the Global System for Mobile Communications and the IS-136, use Mobile-Assisted Hand off (MAHO), in which a Mobile Terminal (MT) assists, it’s BSS and a mobiles witching center in making hand off decisions. MAHO requires an MT to regularly report, back to its serving BSS, its current radio-link state (defined in terms of the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) and the Bit Error Rate (BER)) of transmissions received from neighboring BSSs. In the proposed technique, the MT reports back not only the RSSI and the BER but the number of free channels that are available for the hand off traffic as well. This will ensure that a handed-off call has acceptable signal quality as well as a free available channel. The performance of this hand off technique is analyzed using an analytical model whose solution gives the desired performance measures in terms of blocking and dropping probabilities.