Optimal scheduling of handoffs in cellular networks

Abstract
In thw paper, the phenomenon of hard as well aa soft handoffs in cellular networka ia formulated aa stochastic optimization problems. The signals received by a mobde user are treated as stochastic processes with associated rewards, which are functions of some measurable characteristics of the received signals, w~lle the handoff is associated wi?h a switching penalty. This formulation capturea the trade-offs involved in handoffs in a flexible manner and captures many facets of poptdar cellular communication systems in use currently. Using dynamic pro- gramming, necessary and sutlicient conditions for determining the optimal base station(s) the mobile shotdd be associated with during each decbdon epoch are derived. For the cases where the above-mentioned necessary and sufficient conditions fail to determine an optimal decision, "limited Iookahead" arguments are used for determining handoff decisions. The decidons are taken in a decentralized manner, which makes ita implementation easier compamd to centratiied rdgorithms. Siitdation results show that for the hard handoffs, performance gain by the pro- posed algorithm over the simpler threshold rdgorithma proposed in the literature is smalt; however, for the case of soft handoff% the proposed algorithm offers considerable improvement over the algorithm proposed in the IS-95 standard.

This publication has 13 references indexed in Scilit: