Dynamic PCI allocation on avoiding handover confusion via cell status prediction in LTE heterogeneous small cell networks

Abstract

AbstractIn this paper, we investigate the inbound handover confusion in the two‐tier macrocell‐small cell networks with help of mobility prediction. Instead of studying the mobile user's (MU) movement, we propose an analytical model for the activity status of small cells, which is to exploit the statistical property of inbound handover events that would happen in small cells. We design the cell status prediction algorithm to obtain the optimal prediction outcome of the next status for the small cells. On avoiding the handover confusion, we develop a dynamic allocation approach of physical cell identifier according to the prediction results. We design (i) the cell status prediction‐based strategy, by which the dedicated PCIs will be assigned to the small cells with busy activity status while the other small cells share the public PCIs, and (ii) an integrated strategy in order to fully exploit the usage of PCI. We formulate the preference relation for small cells via reference signal received quality relation integrated with status prediction information using Bayesian average method. Simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithms yield higher accuracy than the conventional methods; in the meantime, handover confusions can be reduced significantly during the inbound handover. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.