| Abstract: | In cellular mobile communication systems, while an active subscriber is moving from one cell to another, the service of his call needs to be handed over to the base station of the new cell. In such a case, cutting the service, due to all channels being busy at the new base station, would be more annoying to subscribers than normal congestion at the first initiation of calls. This paper is concerned with providing a simple approach for choosing the optimum set of channels that need to be reserved for hand‐over calls, while maintaining an acceptable overall system performance. The approach evaluates channel reservation at the cell level, taking into account the offered traffic, that is both the newly initiated original traffic and the hand‐over traffic. The approach produces a simple mathematical solution based on Erlang‐B formula. It uses the concept of ‘Combined Failure Rate’ to evaluate the required reservation. The approach is supported by a simulation study that verifies its validity. Applications of the approach to illustrate its use are also presented. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
