A new handover mechanism for femtocell-to-femtocell

Femtocell networks which use femtocell access point (FAP) and existing networks as backhaul connectivity can meet the requirement of high data rate for wireless communication system as well as solve the indoor coverage problem. The handover from femtocell to femtocell is quite demanding and complicated because there are hundreds of possible target FAPs when mobile station (MS) moves out from the coverage of its serving FAP. In this paper, we propose a new mechanism for femtocell-to-femtocell handover which considers several factors such as received signal level, the hidden FAP problem and the access mode of femtocell. The simulation results show that our proposed scheme has a lower handover failure rate and a smaller neighbor femtocell list than the traditional scheme which is based on received signal level only.