Informatics Publishing Limited

Tijane Fatima Zohra Badri ¹, Rachid Saadane ¹, Mohammed Wahbi ¹, Samir M. Barki ²

Affiliations
1 Electrical Engineering Department, SIR2C2S/LASI-EHTP, Casablanca, MA
2 Departement of Computer Science, LARIT, Ibn Tofail University, Kenitra, MA

Abstract

Femtocell is a small cellular base station in home, a low-power wireless access point designed for use in residential or small business environment, this technology is a promising solution for operators to improve network performance, and the deployment of a femtocell is a key for bandwidth limitation and coverage issues in conventional mobile network system. Therefore, the inter-cell handover process will become more complex, frequent and time-sensitive with the introduction of femtocells in cellular networks. This paper presents the architecture of LTE femtocell networks and investigates the different scenarios in the handover procedure. Especially, the mobility of user from macrocell to femtocell which is quite difficult due to the large number of candidate femtocells in the coverage area and the characteristics of the femtocell entity, In order to achieve the optimize procedure handover decision policy based on using the advantage of the entity HeNB Policy Function to select and make decision of handover based on different constraint to make the optimal decision about the target femtocell to mitigate the unnecessary handovers, hence we describe the decision policies rules as well as the handover signalling flow furthermore, an analytical model was presented for the handover signalling cost.

Keywords

Handover, Femtocell, HeNB, Macrocell, HeNB Policy Function, LTE.

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