Predictive channel reservation for handoff prioritization in wireless cellular networks

In wireless cellular networks, a roaming mobile station (MS) is expected to move from one cell to another. In order to ensure that ongoing calls are not dropped while the owner mobile stations roam among cells, handoff calls may be admitted with a higher priority than newly generated calls. Predictive channel reservation (or pre-reservation) schemes allow the reservation of a channel for an ongoing call in an adjacent cell before its owner MS moves into that cell, so that the call is sustained when the MS moves into the adjacent cell. Pre-reservations are made when the MS is within some distance of the new cell boundary. This distance determines the area in which the MS can make channel reservations. In this paper, we study the effect of the pre-reservation area size on handoff performance in wireless cellular networks. Our studies show that if the reserved channels are strictly mapped to the MSs that made the corresponding reservations, as we increase the pre-reservation area size, the system performance (in terms of the probability that the handoff calls are dropped) improves initially. However, beyond a certain point, the performance begins to degrade due to a large number of false reservations. The optimal pre-reservation area size is closely related to the traffic load of the network and the MSs’ mobility pattern (moving speed). We provide an analytical formulation that furthers understanding with regard to the perceived behavior in one-dimensional networks (in which all cells are along a line). With the objective of improving handoff performance and alleviating this sensitivity to the area size, we propose an adaptive channel pre-reservation scheme. Unlike prior pre-reservation methods, the key idea in our scheme is to send a channel pre-reservation request for a possible handoff call to a neighboring cell not only based on the position and orientation of the owner MS, but also as per its speed towards the target cell. The newly proposed scheme uses GPS measurements to determine when channel pre-reservation requests are to be made. Simulation results show that the adaptive channel pre-reservation scheme performs better in all typical scenarios than a previously proposed popular pre-reservation method that does not take mobility into account.