Analysis of Handoff Interference and Outage along Arbitrary Trajectories in Cellular Networks

We introduce a new system performance measure due to handoff called handoff interference, which characterizes the additional interference noise induced by the handoff process. The handoff interference experienced by a mobile unit is determined by the parameters of the handoff algorithm. We present an exact analysis of the handoff interference and the outage probability and develop a discrete-time method to efficiently and accurately compute these performance metrics along arbitrary trajectories in a cellular network. Our numerical results reveal critical tradeoffs among the critical handoff performance metrics, which should be taken into account in dimensioning the handoff parameters to optimize system performance. We discuss an example handoff design problem, which illustrates how to dimension the handoff parameters to optimize this tradeoff using the proposed handoff analysis.