Traffic driven handoff management scheme in next generation cellular network

In heterogeneous networks, user equipments are allowed to move freely across different access networks. In order to support interworking between different access networks, handoff management is an important factor to be considered in these heterogeneous network. Initiating handoff is one issue of the handoff management in order to find an appropriate time to perform hand over to another cell. Currently, handoff initiation is performed when the signal strength of the current base station deteriorates below an acceptable threshold. However, in these heterogeneous networks, more factors should be considered to initiate the handoff process. This paper presents a traffic driven handoff management scheme which initiate the handoff process based on the load status of cells. In this scheme, the value of received signal strength according to the load status is applied to initiate the right handoff time. A dynamic simulator which is based entirely on MATLAB software is developed, using the designed scheme. The handoff drop call rate has been evaluated in order to measure the service quality. It was found that the proposed scheme could efficiently manage overloaded traffic in the heterogeneous networks at lower capacity, thereby support better service quality.