A new handover method for next generation mobile communication systems

The next generation mobile communication systems, such as the International Mobile Telecommunication-2000 (LMT-2000), will introduce new technologies and services including broadband communications, soft-handovers, micro/pico cell architecture, and multicall/connection services. In this paper, we first clarify the impact of these new technologies and services on handover performance. We then propose a new handover method, in which the handover connection setup process is divided into the network connection setup and the radio connection setup parts, with the former taking place before a handover request by predicting the next cell.