An Enhanced Handover Algorithm in LTE-Advanced Network

Abstract

The continuous demand for data by the ever increasing data consuming phones and wireless user equipment has necessitated the need for the deployment of densely populated small cells in future generation of cellular networks. To improve the overall capacity of the cellular network, small cells such as Femtocells are currently being deployed in LTE-Advanced network and are found to be a good solution to bandwidth limitation and coverage problems. However, the use of femtocell also comes with a lot of problem especially when they are deployed in a dense and highly mobile user’s environment. Mobile equipment in such environment faces various problems such as frequent and unnecessary handovers, interference between femtocells, interference between femtocell and macrocell, power outage and security issues. In this research, we propose an enhanced handover algorithm that reduce the number of unnecessary handovers in LTE-A networks as well as reducing the number of target femtocells and call blocking probability during handover. To determine the performance of the proposed algorithm, we compared the proposed algorithm with an existing handover algorithm.