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Efficient Handover Strategy for Inbound Mobility to LTE Small Cell

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Abstract

Hierarchical macro/small cell deployment is one of the most promising technologies to enhance cell coverage and network capacity in 3GPP LTE/LTE-Advanced systems. However, latency of inbound mobility to the small cell is a critical obstacle to its deployment because it takes much time to detect an associated small cell due to its sparse deployment and to identify the target small cell because of the delay in the verification procedure required before performing inbound handover to the target. Therefore, in order to invigorate the deployment of the LTE small cells, the inbound handover latency must be reduced. To tackle the problem, this paper proposes an efficient handover strategy for inbound mobility to LTE small cells. Performance evaluation by computer simulation shows that the proposed scheme effectively reduces the inbound handover latency. Furthermore, the proposed scheme is compatible and can be directly applied with small overhead to the current LTE/LTE Advanced system implementation.

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Abbreviations

CGI:

Cell global identifier

CSG:

Closed subscriber group

DRX:

Discontinuous reception

eNB:

Evolved node B

HeNB:

Home evolved node B

LTE:

Long term evolution

MIB:

Master information Block

PCI:

Physical cell Identifier

QoS:

Quality of service

RRC:

Radio resource control

SIB1:

System information block 1

UE:

User equipment

3GPP:

3rd generation partnership project

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning(2013R1A1A1008098).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electronic Engineering, Soongsil University, Seoul, Korea

    Min-Ho Park

  2. Division of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Korea Maritime and Ocean University, #727 Taejong-Ro, Youngdo-Gu, Busan, 606-791, Korea

    Yang-Ick Joo

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  1. Min-Ho Park
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  2. Yang-Ick Joo
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Correspondence to Yang-Ick Joo.

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Park, MH., Joo, YI. Efficient Handover Strategy for Inbound Mobility to LTE Small Cell. Wireless Pers Commun 82, 1435–1447 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-015-2291-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-015-2291-8

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