Adaptive channel reservation scheme for soft handoff in DS-CDMA cellular systems

Soft handoff techniques in direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA) systems provide mobile calls with seamless connections between adjacent cells. Channel reservation schemes are used to give high priority to more important soft handoff attempts over new call attempts. However, since the number of soft handoff attempts varies according to environmental conditions, fixed reservation schemes for handoff attempts can be inefficient. An adaptive channel reservation scheme is herein proposed to control the size of reservation capacity according to varying the number of soft handoff attempts. The proposed scheme also includes a balancing procedure between soft handoff failure and new call blocking to maximize the system capacity. To evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme, a Markovian model is developed that considers the interference-limited capacity effect of DS-CDMA systems. Analytical result shows that the proposed scheme yields a considerable enhancement in terms of new call blocking and soft handoff failure probabilities when compared with the conventional fixed channel reservation scheme.