An Effective Hotspot Cell Management Scheme Using Adaptive Handover Time in 4G Mobile Networks

We propose a hotspot cell management scheme using adaptive handover time in 4G mobile networks. 4G networks are expected to support various multimedia services over IP network and satisfy high spectral efficiency requirement with overcoming time and frequency selective fading due to the high speed of users. In cellular systems including 4G networks, hotspot cells can be occurred when available wireless resources at some location are not enough to sustain the needs of users. The hotspot cell can potentially lead to blocked and dropped calls and cause degradation of the service quality. In the meanwhile, a band of users enjoying multimedia services can move around in a 4G mobile network, which may generate heavy flows of traffic load in the network. This situation can generate the hotspot cell which has a short length of life at most a few minutes. In this paper, we propose a handover-based scheme which can effectively manage hotspot cells in 4G mobile networks. The proposed scheme adopts hard handoff mechanism and dynamically controls the time point of handover based on the amount of load of the current serving cell and the target cell. Adaptation of handover time according to the amount of load effectively and flexibly can manage the hotspot cell. And, through our hotspot cell management scheme, acceptable service quality can be supported as users maintain graceful connections with the network. In the simulation results, we find that our scheme makes smaller number of hotspot cells and supports higher service quality than compared schemes.