Performance Evaluation of WCDMA-to-CDMA2000 Handover

Cellular service providers in Korea have started WCDMA commercial service since 2004. The initial deployment has been done in highly-crowded urban districts. Therefore, inter-RAT handover from WCDMA to cdma2000 (hereafter, called as the inter-RAT handover) should be developed to provide seamless service in out-of-service areas. We develop some handover procedures and set conditions for the inter-RAT handover. For the purpose of performance analysis, we build an inter-RAT handover performance simulator. Using the simulator, we determine proper handover conditions and parameter ranges for the inter-RAT handover. Through simulation results, we assess the handover failure rate and the border cell utilization for WCDMA systems. From simulation results, we define the cost function to evaluate performance of handover for each scenario. Based on the values of the cost function, we suggest optimal handover scenarios and parameter sets in the view of users and service-providers, respectively