Mobility-based handover decision mechanism to relieve ping-pong effect in cellular networks

Abstract

In order to guarantee quality of service (QoS) and seamless communications to nomadic users, it is important to prevent unnecessary handovers occurred during a short interval, so-called ping-pong effect. Considering mobility is one of the useful methods to relieve ping-pong effect in cellular networks since a mobile device can efficiently determine whether it should perform handover or not through the estimation of its moving direction or velocity. In this paper, we propose a mobility estimation method that estimates radial velocity of mobile device directed to the neighboring base stations based on the received signal strength (RSS). In addition, we propose an efficient handover decision mechanism based on the estimated mobility to relieve ping-pong effect. From performance evaluation based on simulations, we find that the proposed mobility estimation mechanism can accurately estimate mobility of moving devices and the proposed handover mechanism can effectively relieve ping-pong effect and reduce handover delay.