Dynamic channel reservation (DCR) scheme for handoffs prioritization in mobile micro/picocellular networks

With the recent developments in the field of wireless hand-held mobile terminals, and the diversity of new services that are being introduced in wireless personal communication systems progressively, high bandwidth requirements are likely to be expected in the very near future. On the other hand, due to the inherent bandwidth scarceness on the air interface (spectrum limitations, etc), micro/picocellular architectures are likely to be the most attractive solution, because of the high frequency reuse they allow. As a direct result, the rate of call handoffs increases dramatically as now even users moving at a very low speed (walking) have a higher probability of moving between cells while a call is ongoing. In this paper, channel reservation based on the handoff probability of a call arriving in an adjacent cell is proposed as a more flexible and dynamic means of providing handoff priority in mobile micro/picocellular networks. A basic dynamic channel reservation scheme is described and shown to yield improvements in performance, notably in terms of blocking probability, dropping probability and call non-completion probability, over the well known guard channel scheme.