Handover Scenario and Procedure in LTE-based Femtocell Networks

The deployment of Femtocell as the emerging wireless and mobile access technology becomes a solution for the bandwidth limitation and coverage issues in conventional mobile network system (macrocell). In this paper the handover procedure in femtocell network is investigated. The procedure is based on 3GPP LTE specification. Three handover scenarios: hand-in, hand-out and inter-FAP are considered and analysed. In order to achieve the optimize procedure, the handover decision policy based on mobility prediction is introduced and proposed. The reactive and proactive handover strategy is also proposed to mitigate the frequent and unnecessary handover. The result shows that reactive handover is the potential mechanism to mitigate the unnecessary handover.