Handover provisioning in WCDMA systems

In this paper, we propose a prioritization of handover (HO) calls over new calls in WCDMA systems employing orthogonal variable spreading factor (OVSF) codes as channelization codes. The code occupancy of the system is modeled by a Markov chain and the differentiation between HO and new call is performed at the code level by introducing a "guard code" scheme. The scheme belongs to the well known family of guard channel schemes and reserves some code capacity to favor the continuation of HO calls over the new calls. As the management of the general case is intractable, we solve certain numerical instances of the problem and manage to calculate several popular performance metrics like new call blocking and HO failure probabilities and code utilization.