A Flexible Handoff Prioritization Scheme for Improved Quality of Service in Mobile Networks

Efficient handoff prioritization schemes make mobile networks to perform better. However, most existing schemes have the common characteristics of reducing the call drop probability and increasing the call block probability; this decreases the general network performance. The reservation of channels for the use of handoff calls alone has not proved to be an efficient approach to optimally utilize the network limited channel resources. These approaches are such that even when the reserved channels are not in use, new calls could still get blocked if there are no channels among the shared channels to allocate to the new calls. In trying to maintain an improved QoS for handoff calls while ensuring an acceptable QoS for new calls, different methods have been suggested for new calls to access and use the reserved channels while priority is still given to handoff calls since it is more frustrating to have an on-going call dropped than blocking a new call. Network parameters such as call drop probability and traffic intensity had been used separately to determine when new calls could be granted access to use the reserved channels or otherwise. Handoff queuing and other call admission control approaches have also been used. This paper proposes the use of traffic intensity and call drop probability to decide whether the new calls could use the reserved channels or not. Also proposed is the need to keep the number of reserved channels fixed rather than calculating the numbers to reserve per time therefore reducing the computational complexity of the scheme. The simulation results showed an improved QoS for the handoff calls while producing a commensurate improvement for the new calls through a reduced Call drop Probability and call block probability.