Seamless Handover for LTE Macro-Femto Networks Based on Reactive Data Bicasting

Seamless mobility support is a key technical requirement to motivate the market acceptance of the femtocells. The current 3GPP handover procedure may cause large downlink service interruption time when users move from a macrocell to a femtocell or vice versa due to the data forwarding operation. In this letter, a practical scheme is proposed to enable seamless handover by reactively bicasting the data to both the source cell and the target cell after the handover is actually initiated. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the downlink service interruption time while still avoiding the packet loss with only limited extra resource requirements compared to the standard 3GPP scheme.