A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF PRIORITIZED HANDOFF SCHEMES WITH GUARD CHANNELS IN WIRELESS CELLULAR NETWORKS

Abstract

Mobility management has always been the main challenge in most mobile systems. It involves the management of network radio channel resource capacity for the purpose of achieving optimum quality of service (QoS) standard. In this era of wireless Personal Communication Networks such as Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM), Wireless Asynchronous Transfer Mode (WATM), Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS), there is a continuous increase in demand for network capacity. In order to accommodate the increased demand for network capacity (radio resource) over the wireless medium, cell sizes are reduced. As a result of such reduction in cell sizes, handoffs occur more frequently, and thereby result in increased volume of handoff related signaling. Therefore, a handoff scheme that can handle the increased signaling load while sustaining the standard QoS parameters is required.This work presents a comparative analysis of four popular developed handoff schemes. New call blocking probability, forced termination probability and throughput are the QoS parameters employed in comparing the four schemes. The four schemes are:RCS-GC,MRCS-GC, NCBS-GC, and APS-GC. NCBS-GChas the leased new call blocking probability while APS-GC has the worst. In terms of forced termination probability, MRCS-GC has the best result, whileRCS-GChas the worst scheme.MRCS-GC delivers the highest number of packets per second while APS-GC delivers the least. These performance metrics are computed by using the analytical expressions developed for these metrics in the considered models in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet environment.

http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/njt.v34i3.24