Testing Mobile Station Cell Transitions and Handovers
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Introduction
The handover procedure is what makes a mobile station (MS) mobile. Successful handovers facilitate uninterrupted voice service to the user even while traveling across cell boundaries. Unsuccessful handovers are often the cause of dropped calls. Cell transition procedures are also crucial to allowing the MS to change to neighboring cells when the quality and strength of the current cell’s signal degrades beyond the MS’s threshold. Historically, the requirement has focused on supporting inter-cell handover and cell transitions for a given cellular technology. The situation has now changed with the requirement to support the inter-RAT handover and cell transitions and seamlessly encompass different wireless technologies—GSM/GPRS/EPGRS and W-CDMA/ HSDPA. Testing the ability to perform cell transition and handover procedures between cells of the same or different radio access technologies (RATs) is now easy using two 8960s to create a two-cell test system.