Handoff ordering using signal prediction priority queuing in personal communications systems

Handoffs in a mobile cellular communications environment will become an increasingly important issue as cell sizes shrink to accommodate an increasingly large demand for services. A new handoff ordering method is proposed which can be used to provide rapid handovers with a smaller percentage of dropped calls than other methods. Signal prediction priority queuing (SPPQ) is a generic queuing method which can be adapted to almost any handover technique for the benefit of decreased dropped calls. In a typical personal communications system (PCS) environment, it is shown that for realistic call blocking probabilities (2-6%), SPPQ leads to about 15% fewer dropped calls compared to first in first out (FIFO) queuing. This benefit comes at the expense of a slight increase (<1%) in blocked call percentage. The proposed SPPQ scheme is also compared to a method called the measurement based priority scheme (MBPS) and, based on worst case scenarios, it is shown to outperform MBPS as well