Outage Performance with Handover Triggering in Cellular Mobile Networks

An approach to performance evaluation of cellular mobile networks is proposed, which includes the behavior of handover algorithms in the computation of outage probability. In a general system scenario, with a central cluster and interfering base stations, the average outage probability is computed along a trip of the mobile terminal that involves crossing the boundary between adjacent cells. The effects of correlated co-channel interferers are accounted for in the computation of outage probability, as well as in the dynamics of a relative signal strength handover algorithm. Numerical results are provided and discussed as obtained over a wide range of values of system parameters, namely cluster size and channel parameters. Trade-off curves are shown in terms of outage probability and cross-over point versus the average number of handovers, and possible design criteria are outlined. It is also seen that the local outage analysis (without handover triggering) can be referred to as a lower performance bound in cases of practical interest.