The Effect of Handover on UMTS Services

Abstract

Mobility is an important factor in cellular networks so handover should be used to avoid the termination of call when user signal travel from cell to another in UMTS network. In this paper, the OPNET modeler 14.5 was used to simulate two scenarios of UMTS network the first one with handover support and the second without and study the effect of handover on performance factors such data traffic sent and data traffic received on FTP, HTTP and E-mail and the results appear that handover is very important to use with mobile cellular networks.