Channel carrying: a novel handoff scheme for mobile cellular networks

We present a new scheme that addresses the call handoff problem in mobile cellular networks. Efficiently solving the handoff problem is important for guaranteeing quality of service (QoS) to already admitted calls in the network. Our scheme is based on a new concept called channel carrying: when a mobile user moves from one cell to another, under certain mobility conditions, the user is allowed to carry its current channel. We propose a new channel assignment scheme to ensure that this movement of channels will not lead to any extra co-channel interference or channel locking. In our scheme, the mobility of the channels relies entirely on localized information, and no global coordination is required. Therefore, the scheme is simple and easy to implement. We further develop a hybrid channel carrying scheme that allows us to maximize the performance under various constraints. We provide numerical results comparing our scheme with the traditional channel reservation techniques. We find that our scheme outperforms the reservation scheme over a broad range of traffic parameters