LTE-Advanced: Handover interruption time analysis for IMT-A Evaluation

High-speed data applications over wireless networks have been growing rapidly in recent years. With this increased use of wireless data, services in wireless networks require performance guarantee. This is, therefore, driving the need for regular innovations in wireless technologies to provide more and more capacity and higher quality of service (QoS). These higher performance requirements have motivated 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) to work on LTE-Advanced. LTE-Advanced is a technology enhancement to Long Term Evaluation (LTE) that is under evaluation of the requirements of IMT-Advanced. There are a few mobility enhancements in LTE-Advanced to assure good performance at the time of handover. The generic handover procedure of LTE-Advanced builds upon the one developed for LTE and minimizes the handover interruption time. This tutorial article gives an overview of handover procedure of LTE-Advanced and analyzes handover interruption time in Time Division Duplex (TDD) and Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) modes. The analysis shows that the handover interruption time for LTE-Advanced complies with the IMT-Advanced requirement.