A multicast-based handoff for seamless connection in picocellular networks

With the increase of mobile user population and the advance of wireless technology, the cell size becomes smaller. The smaller cell size causes frequent handoffs between cells, so a new handoff method is needed in order to provide user with the seamless connnection service. In this paper, we propose a handoff method which is fit for the picocellular networks of which cell size is the order of ten meters or more. We call this method SGMH (SubGroup Multicast-based Handoff). Since SGMH considers the MH's speed and the distance from MH's current location to the candidate handoff cells on selecting the multicast subgroups, it reduces the buffer overhead which is a main drawback of multicast-based handoff. We evaluated the performance of SGMH through the analysis and simulation of the traffic of handoff requests. Simulation result shows 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 appications.