Abstract
Micro/picocellular architectures for wireless networks have been proposed in [1] to provide higher capacity under limited radio spectrum. With smaller cell size, the frequency of hand-off events will increase. This will in turn increase the overheads for processing hand-off events. To reduce the overhead due to frequent hand-off, a cell-cluster concept has been proposed in [5]. When a mobile user oscillates between clusters, call processing and control functions are performed frequently. To prevent the shortcoming, overlapping clusters is sugested. In this thesis, we consider cluster-based micro/picocellular networks with overlapping cell-cluster coverage. Simulation results show that the average number of cluster crossings per call is reduced. Performance of two hand-off policies and the effects of system parameters are studied.