Handoff ordering using signal prediction priority queuing in personal communication 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 typical personal communication systems (PCSs) 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 previously developed method called measurement-based priority scheme (MBPS), and, based on worst case scenarios, it is shown to outperform MBPS as well.