Evaluation and Comparison of Soft and Hard Handovers inUniversal Mobile Telecommunication (UMTS) Networks

Abstract

Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) is a third generation mobile communication technology based on Wideband Code Division Multiple Access CDMA (WCDMA) and can facilitate the users in much better way as compared to the second generation of mobile communication. UMTS is superior to second generation in terms of bandwidth efficiency, quality of service, speech quality, speed and capacity. This paper focused on soft and hard handover techniques in UMTS networks and conducted a performance comparison between soft and hard handovers. The project divided into two scenarios: soft handover and hard handover. Soft handover produces better results in terms of uplink transmission power and enables the mobiles to perform the handover at lower power levels. Soft handover benefit from a concept called "soft handover gain" and the network can lower the quality block error ratio (BLER) below the requested level, then the transmission power can be kept at lower levels during soft handover while still providing the same quality to higher layer.In order to simulate typical UMTS scenarios, OPNETv14 modeler is used and a number of users are generating traffic and are free to move in various cells