Group-based Collaborative Handover in LTE macro-femtocell network

Femtocell is a promising solution to improve indoor coverage and system capacity with lower transmit power and enhanced user Quality of Service in LTE network. Moreover, the integration of femtocells into cellular networks makes the inter-cell handover process more frequent and time sensitive. Because femtocell base station uses public Internet to connect with mobile core network, the legacy handover mechanism will introduce great latency when employed in handover process between macrocells and femtocells. To solve this problem, we proposed a new collaborative and fast handover mechanism, in which the nearby femtocell base stations are organized into different groups, and high layer packets are pre-fetched for each group before handover. By careful selection of packet prefetcher and pre-fetching time, this new mechanism has reduced the handover latency and interruption times greatly at little cost of femtocell base station resources. The simulation results verify that this mechanism has better perform than the existed methods.