Efficient Handover Strategy for Inbound Mobility to LTE Small Cell

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.