Handover algorithm based on user’s speed and femtocell capacity in LTE/LTE-A networks

Femtocells as an integral part of LTE/LTE-A has been widely accepted as a good solution to coverage and bandwidth problems in mobile cellular networks. With femtocells, the coverage area of a macrocell base station can be extended and large amount of traffic can be offloaded. Densely deployed femtocells play a major role in meeting data demand in the present and future networks characterized by very high speed and various traffic types. An efficient handover algorithm is therefore required that can work well under such highly mobile and varying traffic scenarios to handle frequent and unnecessary handovers. In this work, a handover algorithm based on user speed and femtocell capacity in LTE/LTE-A has been proposed. The performance of this algorithm is compared with an existing algorithm without consideration for user’s speed and femtocell capacity, in terms of total number of handovers and the ratio of target femtocells in the system.