Modeling of the Handover Dwell Time in Cellular Mobile Communications Systems

In recent years, handover request queueing has been extensively analyzed as a handover protection scheme for future cellular networks. In this frame, however, while channel holding time distribution and cell boundary crossing rate have been modeled, the distribution of the allowed queue waiting time—i.e., the handover dwell time—has remained an open question from the modeling standpoint. In this frame, this paper proposes a model of the handover dwell time in circular cells coverage. The agreement between modeling and simulation results is very satisfactory. A fitting of an asymptotic behavior of the handover dwell-time distribution with a truncated Gaussian function is also provided, measuring the fitting goodness in various test cases. The practical insights the model can provide are also outlined in the paper.