The rapid growth of mobile subscribers throughout the world has generated a
n unexpected demand for nomadic services. In order to answer such demands a
n increase in spectral efficiency must be reached. Considering current tren
ds in reducing cell size in order to achieve a higher spectral efficiency w
hich on the other hand causes an increase in the number of handovers execut
ed by the system, it is of major importance to improve the success rate of
the current handover algorithms, because an excessive number of handovers a
dversely impact the signaling load as well as subscriber annoyance. Therefo
re, effort needs to be devoted to finding optimum handoff strategies. In th
is paper, the impact of the novel fuzzy reasoning handoff strategy is asses
sed. The results obtained from the proposed fuzzy model are compared with t
hose from a classical model with a hysteresis strategy using proposed entro
py criteria. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.