Bearer reservation with preemption for voice call continuity

In Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), the core network consists of two service domains: the circuit-switched (CS) and the packet-switched (PS) domains. A UMTS handset can initiate or receive a call in either the CS or the PS domain. During the call, the user may switch from one domain to another. The switching overhead is an important concern of domain transfer. In this paper, we propose the Bearer Reservation with Preemption (BRP) scheme to support fast domain transfer, and present both analytic model and simulation experiments to investigate the BRP performance. Our study indicates that when user behavior is irregular (i.e., either the variance of the domain residence times or the variance of the call holding times is large), the advantage of the BRP scheme becomes significant.