Joint characterization of outage probability and handover performance in cellular mobile networks

An approach to performance evaluation of cellular mobile networks is proposed, which includes the behavior of handover algorithms in the computation of outage probability. In a general system scenario, with a central cluster and a first tier of interferers, the average outage probability is computed along a trip of the mobile terminal that involves crossing the boundary between adjacent cells. The effects of correlated co-channel interferers are accounted for in the computation of outage probability, as well as in the dynamics of a relative signal strength handover algorithm. Numerical results are presented in terms of average outage probability versus the average number of handovers at various cluster size and cross-correlation parameters.