Downlink performance of handover techniques for IEEE 802.16j multi-hop relay networks

Multi-hop relay (MR) is a well-accepted economical approach to significantly enhance the coverage, throughput and system capacity of the mobile wireless broadband. In this paper, we performed simulation study of the performance of various handover techniques for time division duplex (TDD) - orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) based two-hop cellular networks at different mobile station (MS) speeds. The simulated handover techniques are hard handover (HHO), macro diversity handover (MDHO) and fast base station switching (FBSS). The performance metric is the overall average downlink (DL) carrier to interference and noise ratio (CINR). Results show that MDHO outperforms FBSS and HHO.