Handoff in Wireless Mobile Networks

Mobility is the most important feature of a wireless cellular communication system. Usually, continuous service is achieved by supporting handoff (or handover) from one cell to another. Handoff is the process of changing the channel (frequency, time slot, spreading code, or combination of them) associated with the current connection while a call is in progress. It is often initiated either by crossing a cell boundary or by a deterioration in quality of the signal in the current channel. Handoff is divided into two broad categories— hard and soft handoffs. They are also characterized by “break before make” and “make before break.” In hard handoffs, current resources are released before new resources are used; in soft handoffs, both existing and new resources are used during the handoff process. Poorly designed handoff schemes tend to generate very heavy signaling traffic and, thereby, a dramatic decrease in quality of service (QoS). (In this chapter, a handoff is assumed to occur only at the cell boundary.) The reason why handoffs are critical in cellular communication systems is that neighboring cells are always using a disjoint subset of frequency bands, so negotiations must take place between the mobile station (MS), the current serving base station (BS), and the next potential BS. Other related issues, such as decision making and priority strategies during overloading, might influence the overall performance. In the next section, we introduce different types of possible handoffs. In Section 1.3, we describe different handoff initiation processes. The types of handoff decisions are briefly described in Section 1.4 and some selected representative handoff schemes are presented in Section 1.5. Finally, Section 1.6 summarizes the chapter.