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An Improved Handover Algorithm for LTE-A Femtocell Network

Olusegun O. Omitola 1,2 and Viranjay M. Srivastava 1
1. Department of Electronic Engineering, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban – 4041, South Africa
2. Department of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti, Nigeria

Abstract—Femtocells have been regarded as low-power and low cost devices for enhancing the capacity and performance of mobile cellular networks. Apart from forming a two-tier network with the macrocell to offload traffic from the macrocell, femtocells can be deployed in an urban area to achieve more data rate with better Quality of Service (QoS). However, this is at the expense of increased frequency of the handover of the UEs from one femtocell to another femtocell. Selecting a particular femtocell for handover is a serious challenge in a femtocell/macrocell deployment environment. Similarly, managing the resulting handovers can be extremely difficult. Thus, this study presents an algorithm to improve handover in LTE-A femtocell network. The complexity of the algorithm was determined and the performance by comparing it with existing algorithm in terms of number of handovers and the ratio of target femtocells. The results have shown that the proposed algorithm outperformed the existing algorithm.

Index Terms—Femtocell, cellular networks, macrocell, QoS, handover, LTE-Advanced

Cite: Olusegun O. Omitola and Viranjay M. Srivastava, "An Improved Handover Algorithm for LTE-A Femtocell Network," Journal of Communications vol. 15, no. 7, pp. 558-565, July 2020. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.15.7.558-565

Copyright © 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the article is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.