An intelligent handover scheme for the next generation personal communication systems

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Driven by the growing number of the mobile subscribers, efficient channel resource management plays a key role for provisioning multimedia service in the next generation personal communication systems. To reuse limited channel resources, diminishing the coverage areas of cells seems to be the ultimate solution. Thus, however, causes more handover events. To provide seamless connection environment for mobile terminals and applications, this article presents a novel handover scheme called the intelligent channel reservation (ICR) scheme, which exploits the location prediction technologies to accurately reserve channel resources for handover connections. Considering the fact that each mobile terminal has its individual mobility characteristic, the ICR scheme utilizes a channel reserving notification procedure (CRNP) to collect adequate parameters for predicting the future location of individual mobile terminals. These parameters will be utilized by the handover prediction function to estimate the expected handover blocking rate and the expected number of idle channels. Based on the handover prediction estimations, a cost function for calculating the damages from blocking the handover connections and idling channel resources, and a corresponding algorithm for minimizing the cost function are proposed. In addition, a guard channel decision maker (GCDM) determines the appropriate number of guard channels. The experimental results show that the ICR scheme does reduce the handover-blocking rate while keeping the number of idle channels small.