Soft Handoff in MC-CDMA Cellular Networks Supporting Multimedia Services

Abstract

An adaptive resource reservation and handoff priority scheme, which jointly considers the characteristics from the physical, link and network layers, is proposed for a packet switching Multicode (MC)-CDMA cellular network supporting multimedia applications. A call admission region is derived for call admission control (CAC) and handoff management with the satisfaction of quality of service (QoS) requirements for all kinds of multimedia traffic, where the QoS parameters include the wireless transmission bit error rate (BER), the packet loss rate (PLR) and delay requirement. The BER requirement is guaranteed by properly arranging simultaneous packet transmissions, whereas the PLR and delay requirements are guaranteed by the proposed packet scheduling and partial packet integration scheme. To give service priority to handoff calls, a threshold-based adaptive resource reservation scheme is proposed on the basis of a practical user mobility model and a proper handoff request prediction scheme. The resource reservation scheme gives handoff calls a higher admission priority over new calls, and is designed to adjust the reservation-request time threshold adaptively according to the varying traffic load. The individual reservation requests form a common reservation pool, and handoff calls are served on a first-come-first-serve basis. By exploiting the transmission rate adaptability of video calls to the available radio resources, the resources freed from rate-adaptive high-quality video calls by service degradation can be further used to prioritize handoff calls. With the proposed resource reservation and handoff priority scheme, the dynamic properties of the system can be closely captured and a better grade of service (GoS) in terms of new call blocking and handoff call dropping probabilities(rates) can be achieved compared to other schemes in literature. Numerical results are presented to show the improvement of the GoS performance and the efficient utilization of the radio resources.