Characterization of handover initialization in cellular mobile radio networks

The event of handing over a call from one base station to another in a cellular mobile radio network requests the cooperation of many system elements, with a consequent load of signalling traffic. Therefore, accurate design of handover procedures must be ensured, to avoid the occurrence of forced terminations and unnecessary handovers. This can be pursued by averaging the received power samples with a window of suitable shape and length, N, and by introducing a hysteresis cycle with margin H (dB). In the paper, a software simulator is described that allows the design of N and H considering the handover occurrence rate and the probability of unnecessary handover. Rectangular and exponential averaging window shapes have been considered