Evaluation of a minimum power handoff algorithm

Previous work has shown that a handoff algorithm based on SIR alone (SIR based handoff) prohibits handoffs near nominal cell boundaries, causing cell dragging and unnecessarily high transmitter powers. We propose the minimum power handoff (MPH) algorithm in which mobiles constantly search for a combination of base and channel assignment that minimizes the uplink transmitted power. This algorithm is shown to reduce the average power level by 4dB compared to SIR based handoff. Results show that using received power as a handoff criterion reduces call dropping but increases the number of unnecessary handoffs significantly. To avoid a “ping pong” effect, a timer is introduced to delay the intercell handoff