Handover Implementation for Femtocell Deployment in LTE Heterogeneous Networks

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the latest mobile network technology that design to further increases of network capacity and coverage. An extensive research on femtocell network known as Home eNodeB has been investigated in LTE to improve the indoor network capacity and further extension of the coverage area in wireless communication networks. However, the handover process in femtocell has becomes a major challenge due to a frequent and unnecessary handover which can increase of handover failure probability rate. Therefore, the main objectives of this research is to derive a mathematical formulation of the dynamic boundary area size by incorporating value of user's speed and signaling delay in adaptive Reference Signal Received Power threshold (RSRP
_th
) to ensure the determination of the right femtocell handoff initiation time. In order to observe the value of RSRP
_th
, the users' speed and signaling delay were analyzed based on the probability of false handoff initiation (p
_a
) and probability of handover failure (p
_f
). The simulation results show that the proposed values of adaptive RSRP
_th
has better performance in initiating a handoff when the speed and signaling delay time varies. The preferred values avoid from sending too early or too late initiation of the femtocell handoff process and hence offload traffic from the heavily loaded macrocells.