Multi-objective handover in LTE macro/femto-cell networks

One of the key elements in the emerging, packet-based long term evolution (LTE) cellular systems is the deployment of multiple femtocells for the improvement of coverage and data rate. However, arbitrary overlaps in the coverage of these femto-cells make the handover operation more complex and challenging. As the existing handover strategy of LTE systems considers only carrier to interference plus noise ratio (CINR), it often suffers from resource constraints in the target femtocell, thereby leading to handover failure. In this paper, we propose a new efficient, multi-objective handover solution for LTE cellular systems. The proposed solution considers multiple parameters like signal strength and available bandwidth in the selection of the optimal target cell. This results in a significant increase in the handover success rate, thereby reducing the blocking of handover and new sessions. The overall handover process is modeled and analyzed by a three-dimensional Markov chain. The analytical results for the major performance metrics closely resemble the simulation results. The simulation results show that the proposed multi-objective handover offers considerable improvement in the session blocking rates, session queuing delay, handover latency, and goodput during handover.