Channel Carrying: A Novel Handoff Scheme for Mobile Cellular Networks 1

We present a new scheme that addresses the call handoff problem in mobile cellular net-works. Efficiently solving the handoff problem is important for guaranteeing Quality of Service (QoS) to already admitted calls in the network. Our scheme is based on a new concept called channel car,rying: when a mobile user moves from one cell to another, under certain mobility conditions,.the user is allowed to carry its current channel into the new cell. We propose a new channel assignment scheme to ensure that this movement of channels will not lead to any extra co-channel interference or channel locking. In our scheme, the mobility of channels relies entirely on localized information, and no global coordination is required. Therefore, this new handofl ' scheme is simple and can be easily implemented. We further develop a hybrid channel carrying scheme that allows us to maximize performance under various constraints. We provide numerical results comparing our scheme with the traditional channel reserva