Base station distributed handover optimization in LTE self-organizing networks

Methods of self-organizing networks (SON) are an essential part of the latest 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) technology Long Term Evolution (LTE). Among the different identified use cases in standard self-organized handover optimization plays an important role concerning the overall radio network performance. In this paper, we present results as obtained from simulations on a handover optimization procedure performed distributed to base stations of the radio network. Based on a simulation scenario which is characterized by heterogeneous radio conditions between neighboring cells we show the procedure's capability of an efficient and stable modification from initial suboptimal parameter settings towards optimum values of the handover key performance indicators (KPIs).