Handoff criteria for personal communication networks

The rapid growth in wireless personal communication networks (PCN) has placed demands on higher system capacity and performance. One way to increase the capacity of a cellular system is by reducing the size of the cells to microcells. But, in such microcellular environment the frequency of handoff also increases. Since the handoffs increase the load on the network system, they should be minimized. Generally hysteresis and averaging are used to decrease the number of handoffs. These have a deteriorating effect on the signal quality. It is important to have the right compromise between the number of handoffs and the overall received signal quality. An adaptive prediction based handoff algorithm has bee proposed to reduce the number of unnecessary handoffs. This is verified by a simulation of a microcellular CDMA/FDMA system