A multicast-based handoff for seamless connection in picocellular networks

With the increase of the mobile user population and the advance of wireless technology, cell size becomes smaller. This smaller cell size causes frequent handoffs between cells, so a new handoff method is needed in order to provide the user with the seamless connection service. In this paper, we propose a handoff method which is fit for the picocellular networks the cell size of which is the order of ten meters or more. We call this method SGMH (SubGroup Multicast-based Handoff). Since SGMH considers the MH speed and the distance from the MH's current location to the candidate handoff cells, on selecting the multicast subgroups, it reduces the buffer overhead which is the main drawback of multicast-based handoff. We evaluated the performance of SGMH through the analysis and simulation of the traffic of handoff requests. Simulation results show that the reduction of buffer overhead decreases the blocking probability of handoff requests. We believe that SGMH will be applied for the time constraint service area such as audio and video related applications.