Trends in handover design

Handover is the mechanism that transfers an ongoing call from one cell to another as a user moves through the coverage area of a cellular system. As smaller cells are deployed to meet the demands for increased capacity, the number of cell boundary crossings increases. The author presents an overview of published work on handover performance and control and discusses current trends in handover research. He discusses investigations that are applicable to a single tier of cells. He focuses on macrocells, but includes a brief discussion on how things change as cell sizes shrink. By assuming an overlay of macrocells and microcells he summarizes issues and approaches unique to such systems