Standard-compliant simulation for self-organization schemes in LTE femtocells

Femtocells play a critical role in LTE and LTE-Advanced networks. Their particular advantage is realized by their autonomy in management and optimization. Our interest in this work is in a special category of self-optimization use cases overseeing femtocell handovers. Specifically, we present a flexible, extendable and standards-compliant environment written in MATLAB for studying handover related self-optimization schemes. The paper describes the overall structure and design of the environment, and offers a detailed explanation of the different modules involved. Sample results that validate the environment are also given. To the best of our knowledge, no such environment has been publicly accessible so far.