Estimated Frequency of Handovers in Muos

In the DoD mobile user operational system (MUOS), extremely large beams (cells), relatively small number of users traveling at high velocities, and relatively short call hold times indicate that handovers (all of which are hard handovers) will occur far less frequently than in typical commercial systems. In this paper, we estimate the frequency of handovers in MUOS using different levels of handover suppression. Handover suppression refers to the practice of delaying the time at which a handover would normally take place. In this work, we develop mathematical expressions representing the probability of handover for MUOS users engaged in point-to-point calls and use Mathematica to evaluate said expressions to extract probability values. We first compute results based upon user movement only and then factor in the effects of satellite motion