Proactive unnecessary handover avoidance scheme in LTE-A small cells

In this paper, the unnecessary handover avoidance scheme is discussed in Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) small cells. Specifically, a handover is considered as unnecessary one if the active time in the target cell (i.e., duration where the user equipment can perform data communication) is not larger than a pre-defined threshold, where the active time is predicted before the handover through the average increased active time due to one packet arrival and the number of packets arriving during the dwell time in the cell. After that, if the probability that the active time is not larger than the pre-defined threshold is large enough, the source eNB would not carry out such handover due to the potential unnecessary handover. The numerical and simulation results verify that the proposed scheme can avoid the unnecessary handover precisely and efficiently.