Alternative routing strategies for adjacent cells in mobile radio systems

The hexagonal shape of the cells in a mobile radio system is considered as an ideal model. In practice, the cells are not clearly defined but have fuzzy boundaries because of the statistical fluctuations in path losses. If a mobile is near a cell boundary, it may have adequate communication with more than one base station. The authors use this property as the basis for four proposed alternative routing strategies. These techniques are applied in a two-cell system, and their performance analysed in the light of information such as total traffic, number of channels per cell, proportion of flexible traffic, and imbalance of traffic between cells. The traffic process has been modelled by the Markov chain, and the results show that there is a substantial increase in capacity. The proposed strategies are compared with the directed retry and, in general, they seem to yield better results