Improved location-based handover algorithm for mobile cellular systems with verification of GSM measurements data

A handover decision mechanism considering only the signal strength induces the "ping-pong effect". This paper proposes an improved handover algorithm, based on the estimates of location and velocity of the mobile station, to suppress the ping-pong effect in cellular systems. A practical location technique was used to estimate the position and velocity of mobile station to identify the correlation among shadowing components of the received signals. The proposed handover algorithm was applied to a real GSM system in urban Taipei city. The results indicate that the number of unnecessary handovers can be reduced by 18∼26 percent by the proposed approach, compared to the conventional method, while the signal outage probability remains similar. Besides, the computational complexity of the proposed algorithm is low without using any database or lookup table.