Adaptive handover boundaries: a proposed scheme for enhanced system performance

Largely, current cellular network design is based on the hypothesis of uniformly distributed offered traffic. However, the reality has shown that the traffic has the tendency to appear rather unevenly distributed throughout the network, creating areas of reduced or increased load (hot spot areas), and even worse this traffic distribution tends to change also in time. Unfortunately, the existence of highly loaded areas may result in degradation of system performance. This paper describes an adaptive scheme, which achieves equalisation of the traffic load among several adjacent cells. This scheme makes substantial utilisation of the coverage areas among the cells by dynamically changing the handover margins of neighbouring cells. Three test cases an examined where the utilisation of the proposed scheme results in significantly enhanced system performance.