Stochastic geometric analysis of handoffs in user-centric cooperative wireless networks

User-centric base station (BS) cooperation has been regarded as an effective solution to improve network coverage and throughput in next-generation wireless systems. However, it also introduces more complicated handoff patterns, which may potentially degrade user performance. In this paper, we aim to quantify the number of handoffs in user-centric cooperative wireless networks. The challenges are two-fold: (1) BSs are spatially randomly deployed, and (2) user-centric BS cooperation further creates complicated network topologies so that it is difficult to track handoffs in the system. We propose a stochastic geometric analysis framework on user mobility, to derive a theoretical expression for the handoff rate experienced by an active user with arbitrary movement trajectory. Furthermore, we characterize the average downlink user data rate under a common non-coherent joint-transmission scheme, which is used to illustrate the tradeoff between handoff rate and data rate in optimizing the cooperative cluster size for each user. Finally, computer simulation is conducted to validate the correctness and usefulness of our analysis.