Patent ID: 8379597

Claim:
A method, executed by a base station, for controlling handovers of a radio connection to a mobile station between base stations of a cellular communication network, comprising: assigning a priority level to handover trigger causes includes in a handover request or confirm message and coding the prioritized handover trigger causes to obtain codes; subdividing the codes into a first class associated with unrestricted handovers and a second class associated with handovers subjected to restriction; storing an identifier of a previous serving base station for an incoming handover accepted for a mobile station; starting a penalty timer if the code of the prioritized handover trigger cause of an accepted handover belongs to a given subset of the second class; deciding a new valid condition to trigger a handover request for the mobile station, comprising: detecting if a target base station identifier is equal to the stored identifier, detecting if the code of the prioritized handover trigger cause of the new valid condition belongs to the second class, and determining that a penalty elapsed time is below a configurable value; and suppressing issuance of a handover request for the mobile station if all the conditions of the deciding step are simultaneously met, otherwise issuing a handover request including the handover trigger cause.