Using opportunistic caching to improve the efficiency of handover in LTE with a PON access network backhaul

This paper investigates the converged architecture of an LTE mobile network and a PON access network. We identify that the default handover behaviour for LTE is highly inefficient when performed on a backhaul PON tree-topology. We propose a scheme of intelligent opportunistic caching, using the existing resources at the eNBs, to help mitigate this inefficiency. We show that we can achieve a significant reduction in the amount of redundant traffic sent over the PON and that in circumstances when the PON upstream is heavily congested, we can greatly improve the mobile terminal's sustained data rate by up to 50% during the handover process.