Traffic Driven Handoff Management Scheme for Next Generation Cellular Networks (NGCN)

In NGCN, mobile users can move between heterogeneous networks. In this kind of environment, handoff management is the essential issue that supports the handoff of users between various wireless technologies. Handoff decision, one of the handoff management issues consists of finding the appropriate time to perform the handoff and which cell to hand over in cellular networks. Traditionally, the need for initiating the handoff arises when the RSS of the serving base station deteriorates below a certain threshold value. However, in a heterogeneous network environment, more criteria (not only RSS) are needed to initiate the appropriate time to perform the handoff. This research presents a traffic driven handoff management scheme which adopts a hard handoff scheme to adaptively control the handoff time according to the load status of cells. Before accepting a new user, it requests the load information of the target cell in advance before handoff execution. Then, the value of adaptive RSS is applied in the scheme to initiate the right handoff time. The results show that how the handoff initiation criteria might be set in accordance with the quality of services requested by users. It was found that the proposed scheme can support better service quality than the scheme compared. The scheme could efficiently manage overloaded traffic in the system.