Queueing channel assignment strategies for PCS hand-off and initial access

The forced termination probability (the probability that a hand-off call is blocked) is an important criterion in the performance evaluation of the personal communication service (PCS) networks. The forced termination of an ongoing call is considered less desirable than blocking the initial access of a new call. This paper proposes analytic and simulation models to study the performance of different channel assignment strategies for hand-off and initial access. We observe that giving a priority to hand-off attempts over initial access attempts would dramatically improve the forced termination probability of the system without seriously degrading the number of failed initial access attempts. Some of our results are different from previous published results because our models capture features not considered in those studies.