Distribution of the number of handovers in a cellular mobile communication network: Delayed renewal process approach

Knowing the distribution of the number of handovers during a call session of a given user is particularly important in cellular mobile communication networks in order to make appropriate dimensioning of virtual circuits for wireless cells. In this paper, we study the probability distributions and statistical moments for the number of handovers per call for a variety of combinations of the call holding time (CHT) and cell residence time (CRT) distributions. We assume that the first CRT in the originating cell has different statistics from the CRTs in the subsequent cells. In particular, we consider circular cells. Based on the formulation in terms of delayed renewal processes, we obtain analytical expressions for the probability mass functions and moments of the handover number distribution. We also include some numerical results for the mean number of handovers.