Impact of Intra-LTE Handover with Forwarding on the User Connections

In order to ensure long-term competitiveness of 3G technology, a new study item has been started by 3GPP to define the Long Term Evolution (LTE) of 3G. The scope of the LTE concept is to improve the system performance in terms of data rate, throughput, latency, coverage and cost. LTE introduces a pure packet based architecture, with distributed mobility management, where active mode handover decisions are done by E-UTRAN Node-Bs (eNB). During handover, downlink user data is forwarded between the involved eNBs. This paper provides an overview of the LTE and the intra-MME/SAE Gateway handover procedure. The impact of the forwarding on the user connections is evaluated with NS2 based simulations.