Cooperative directional inter-cell handover scheme in high altitude platform communications systems

A novel Cooperative Directional inter-cell Handover Scheme (CDHS) for High Altitude Platform (HAP) communications systems is proposed, in which the handover target cell and the two cells adjacent to this handover target cell work cooperatively to exploit the traffic fluctuation to improve handover performance. Users in the overlap area of the overloaded handover target cell will be forced to handover directionally before their optimal handover boundary in order to free up resources for the handover calls which would otherwise be dropped due to the shortage of resources and queue time out. Simulation results show that the handover call dropping probability is greatly reduced (at least 60%) compared with the general queue handover scheme, with little performance reduction to the call blocking probability, and the Not in the Best Cell (NBC) average time is only increased moderately. Moreover, an optimal cell radius can be achieved for a specific platform speed by minimizing the unified system performance, which is the linear combination of the handover call dropping probability and the NBC average time.