Handoff in Cellular System

When a mobile user travels from one area of coverage or cell to another cell within a call’s duration the call should be transferred to the new cell’s base station. Otherwise, the call will be dropped because the link with the current base station becomes too weak as the mobile recedes. Indeed, this ability for transference is a design matter in mobile cellular system design and is call handoff. Otherwise we can say in a cellular telephone network, handoff is the transition for any given user of signal transmission from one base station to a geographically adjacent base station as the user moves around.

 Types of handoff are

Hard handover is one in which the channel in the source cell is released and only then the channel in the target cell is engaged. Thus the connection to the source is broken before or 'as' the connection to the target is made—for this reason such handovers are also known as break-before-make. Hard handovers are intended to be instantaneous in order to minimize the disruption to the call.

Soft handover is one in which the channel in the source cell is retained and used for a while in parallel with the channel in the target cell. In this case the connection to the target is established before the connection to the source is broken, hence this handover is called make-before-break. The interval, during which the two connections are used in parallel, may be brief or substantial.