System Information Acquisition Schemes for Fast Scanning of Femtocells in 3GPP LTE Networks

The use of femtocells is one of the most interesting current issues in 3GPP LTE/LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) systems. System information (SI) aquisition is an essential process for handover (HO) to closed subscriber group (CSG) cells, (including femtocells). In this letter, we propose and analyze five serial SI acquisition schemes. Moreover, we propose a novel parallel scanning method to enhance the delay performance of other proposed schemes. Our results show that the parallel SI acquisition scheme indeed has better performance than serial SI acquisition schemes.