Performance Evaluation of Signal Strength Based Handover Algorithms

Performance evaluation of handover algorithms has been studied for mobile cellular network. Effects of averaging, hysteresis margin and shadow fading are investigated for different handoff algorithms. Probability of outage, handover delay and average number of handovers are considered as performance metrics. Different handover algorithms considered here are based on relative signal strength with hysteresis, relative signal strength with hysteresis and threshold, absolute signal strength and combined relative and absolute signal strength. Both analytical and simulation methods have been used in this paper. This study is important as performance analyses of cellular system, in presence of handoff, will be important for future generation wireless networks, for example, WiMAX, UMTS.