CATV-based personal communications network: The architectures and handoff schemes

The cable TV (CATV) network is an ideal backbone for PCS due to its prevale nt and broadcast nature. This significantly reduces the implementation cost s and the handoff overheads. This paper proposes two architectures for the CATV-based PCS system. In the first architecture, each base station is equi pped with multiple fixed receivers to provide fast and seamless handoffs fo r mobile users. Nevertheless, the hardware cost for this implementation is relative expensive. To overcome this, in the second architecture, each base station is equipped with only one tunable receiver. This simple and econom ic architecture suffers from the possibility of offset conflict when mobile terminals handoff between cells. Three offset assignment algorithms based on the concepts of random assignment, neighbor usage, and clustering, respe ctively are proposed to solve the offset conflict problem. Simulation resul ts indicate the one with the concept of clustering performs much better tha n the other two schemes in terms of offset conflict probability.