The impact of evolutionary cell architectures on handover in future mobile telecommunication systems

In future mobile telecommunication systems the stepwise user penetration rate increase will demand “proper” cell planning (towards microcells and layered cell structures) to carry the offered traffic. As the system evolves small size cells will increase the number of handovers per call affecting thus the offered QoS (e.g., call dropping probability) and the network performance (e.g., signalling load on the radio link and processing power requirements). In this paper we consider three cell layout scenarios and we estimate the user penetration rate that the system can withstand so as to meet the QoS criteria (i.e., call blocking, handover blocking and call dropping probabilities) for various handover handling schemes. To confront the apparent complexity a simulation tool has been developed