Using opportunistic caching to improve the efficiency of handover in LTE with a PON access network backhaul

This paper investigates the converged architecture of an LTE mobile network and a PON access network. We identify that the default handover behaviour for LTE is highly inefficient when performed on a backhaul PON tree-topology. We propose a scheme of intelligent opportunistic caching, using the existing resources at the eNBs, to help mitigate this inefficiency. We show that we can achieve a significant reduction in the amount of redundant traffic sent over the PON and that in circumstances when the PON upstream is heavily congested, we can greatly improve the mobile terminal´s sustained data rate by up to 50% during the handover process.