Architectures and handoff schemes for CATV-based personal communications network

The initial cost to provide personal communications services (PCS) based on the conventional networks is relative high. As the radio cells move toward smaller size, the traditional procedures for call setup and control are not suitable well due to the high handoff frequency. The cable TV (CATV) network is one of the most attractive backbones for PCS due to its prevalent and broadcast nature. This significantly reduces the implementation costs and the handoff overheads. This paper proposes two architectures for the CATV-based PCS system. In the first architecture, each base station is equipped with multiple fixed receivers to provide fast and seamless handoffs for mobile terminals. Nevertheless, it suffers from the expensive hardware cost. In the second architecture, each base station is only equipped with one tunable receiver. This simple and economic architecture suffers from the possibility of offset conflict when mobile terminals handoff between the cells. Three channel allocation algorithms are proposed to resolve the offset conflict problem. Simulation results indicate the one with the concept of clustering performs much better than the other two schemes in terms of offset conflict probability.