INVESTIGATION OF HANDOVERS IN 3G UMTS TRAFFIC CLASSES

Abstract: The Universal Mobile Telecommunication systems are one of the emerging cellular phone technologies which are known as the 3G systems. It support the high speed data transfer, speech, web browsing, email, video telephony, multimedia and the audio streaming. These services are divided in to the classes depending upon the QoS requirements. With the development of these cellular networks, a major problem came up; it was the call handover from one cell to the other cell during an ongoing session without dropping the connection with the base station. A lot of techniques were developed and used to cope with this major issue. The user’s movement is a dynamic process considering its location. This means that the mobile users can change its way any time with any speed, so there should be a mechanism and a way that the network should be aware of this process. For this purpose different types of handovers techniques are used which include soft, hard and softer handovers. The thesis work is about the investigation of different handovers in the 3G UMTS network which is the vital issue to the network to maintain the user’s connection during in the ongoing session with the user’s movement. The investigation is based on the UMTS QoS traffic classes. For this purpose the soft and the hard handovers techniques are analyzed in different scenarios implemented in the OPNET Modeler. To know and understand about the handover process between the Node B and the user equipment different statistics are calculated.