Probabilistic Path and Data Capacity Based Handover Decision for Hierarchical Macro- and Femtocell Networks

Abstract EN

Femtocells are considered a technology to improve performance of a network by increasing network coverage and communication capacity at a relatively low cost.

However, if there are a lot of femtocells in a macrocell, the number of handovers greatly increases, and unnecessary handovers can occur from the mobile station temporarily passing through a femtocell.

In this paper, we propose a method that probabilistically estimates the path in a femtocell and makes a handover decision based on the available data capacity of a mobile station on the estimated path.

Simulation results show that the proposed method effectively reduces the number of unnecessary handovers while improving the data rate and capacity.