Performance of received power and traffic-driven handover algorithms in urban cellular networks

This article presents an investigation of the handover algorithms suitable for implementation in urban mobile cellular networks based on TDMA. More precisely, the class of received power and traffic-driven handover algorithms, which are based on absolute and relative measured values of received power and on actual traffic load, is analyzed. The algorithms usually investigated in the literature (and often implemented in actual mobile networks) belong to this class. We show the performance of traditional algorithms, and also propose some new ones, in an effort to reduce the probability of dropout due to sudden changes of received power and to distribute the traffic load over several cells; they show performance improvements with respect to those previously known from the literature. The performance of the different handover algorithms is evaluated by means of a simulation tool that allows the consideration of complex scenarios, suitable mobility and propagation models, power control, cell sectorization, nonuniform user distribution, and so on. The metrics used for performance comparison are the outage, blocking, dropout, and satisfaction probabilities, whose different definitions are discussed in the article, and the average number of handovers per call. Several urban scenarios, characterized by uniform and nonuniform traffic distributions, are taken into account. Our results show that one of the proposed algorithms, based on traffic estimates, yields the best performance of all the considered scenarios.