Performance analysis of cooperative handover in heterogeneous wireless networks

The cooperative relay protocol is investigated in heterogeneous wireless networks. To analyze the handover impact of a cooperative relay node on a heterogeneous environment, we propose two typical mobility scenarios to evaluate the performance metrics, such as the capacity, outage probability, and service delay. The difference from a three-node link performance evaluation is that the node speed is considered as a major factor in the heterogeneous network performance models. By conducting a numerical analysis and simulation, we found the optimal relay configuration in a heterogeneous environment, which constrains the performance metrics by both relay number and velocity.