Performance of Hard Handover in 5G Heterogeneous Networks

To satisfy the high data demands in future cellular networks, an ultra-densification approach is introduced to shrink the coverage of base station (BS) and improve the frequency reuse. In an ultra-densification approach, small cells such as relay node (RN), micro, pico and femto base stations (BSs) are deployed to the network of macro cells in the same geographic region, forming HetNet. HetNets introduce some notable challenges like inter-cell-interference-coordination (ICIC), mobility management and backhaul provisioning. In this paper, we investigate the performance of the hard handover (HHO) in 5G HetNets. The performance metrics are the total number of handovers and the outage probability. Simulation results show that the average outage probability is decreased in HetNet scenario compared the macro only scenario. However, this improvement comes at the expense of increase number of handovers.