Signaling Overhead and Power Consumption during Handover in LTE

In this paper, we address the signaling overhead and the power consumption that results from the transmission of handover-related signaling in a Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular network. Specifically, we analyze the contribution of the different signaling messages over the air-interface, and their impact on power consumption both at the eNB and at the User Equipment (UE) during handover (HO). A quantitative analysis is provided using system level simulations. We observe that, within the HO process, the largest contributor to air-interface signaling overhead is the transmission of the measurement report by the UE. This uplink (UL) transmission suffers from different channel impairments, due to interference and transmission range, for particular cell sizes. As a consequence, uplink signaling retransmissions are triggered causing higher signaling load and consequently higher power consumption, this being especially detrimental to battery-powered devices.