Guard channel sharing strategies in integrated voice/data mobile networks

Wireless mobile multimedia networks trend to adopt micro/picocellular architectures in order to earn higher spectral efficiency and support higher data rate than that of macrocellular systems. Using small cell size architecture results in an increase of call handoffs. The guard-channel strategies are adopted to reduce the force terminating probability of handoff calls. Meanwhile, in mobile multimedia networks, guard channels are also used to guarantee the QoS of data service. However, reserving too many guard channels, on the other hand, results in bandwidth inefficiency. The number of guard channels is reduced to increase the bandwidth utilization. We proposed that parts of voice guard channels share with data traffic but the voice traffic has higher priority in an integrated voice/data mobile network. This scheme keeps the QoS of both on the voice and data service and increase the bandwidth utilization.