A predictive load-sharing scheme in a microcellular radio environment

In a metropolitan microcellular environment, the cell coverage zone can be highly irregular. Thus highly overlapping areas can result due to an attempt to achieve ubiquitous coverage. The authors propose a predictive load sharing (PLS) scheme to alleviate localised congestion by using the knowledge of users potentially entering and leaving a cell. They study the system in a linear bidirectional highway environment. Results show that load carried is increased and the handoff failure rate is lowered compared to the fixed channel assignment (FCA) scheme. A lower handoff failure rate is a desirable feature since the forced termination of an existing call can be very annoying to a user