Comparative analysis of handover and traffic classes in UMTS using OPNET simulator for improving QoS

Universal Mobile Telecommunication Systems (UMTS) is amongst the most promising cellular technology specifically used for 3G systems. 3rd Generation (3G) wireless networks are designed to endow with spot on wireless Internet services for instance voice and video conferencing, file downloading and web browsing etc. with towering Quality of Service (QoS) performances. These services are characterized in to four traffic classes (Conversational, Streaming, Interactive and Background) as per the QoS needs. Along with the progression of UMTS, mobility of users is the main apprehension (characteristic of the handover) that necessitates being well thought-out for sustaining effectual level of QoS. This paper sets to investigate the analysis of four variant traffic classes during soft and hard handover schemes for enhancing Quality of Services when traffic is sent or received through the network. Diverse scenarios are implemented using OPNET 14.5 Modeller simulator in UMTS network. For analyzing results a variety of statistics are calculated such as ‘Active Cell Count’, ‘End to End Delay’, ‘Throughput’, ‘Traffic sent’ and ‘Traffic received’.