Cooperative control of connected micro-cells for a virtual single cell for fast handover

Microcellular network will have to become a proper choice for broadband mobile network in future mobile multimedia due to its high re-use radio resource. This paper discusses packet multiplexing control of connected micro-cells as a virtual single cell to support fast handover in such a micro-cell network. Adjacent cells are grouped into a multicast group to create an LMC (Logical Macro Cell) and active MTs (Mobile Terminal) in the same serving BS are assigned to an identical LMC. When an MT changes its connection to a new cell, its LMC also switches over to a new LMC with the purpose of reserving resources for future handover of the MT. Switch-over of LMC creates a virtual single cell environment for each MT. The switchover time is only the processing time in which the central node (CN) changes in rows of the LMC table. The wireless segment of the LMC offers radio connections over parallel polling to each terminal instead of contention to support for fast mobility between micro-cells. By reserving resource for each MT in each BS (base station) through scheduled parallel polling, the handover between micro-cells is performed at the answer of the polling in a new cell. Thus it is not necessary to stop connection and contend with other MTs for gaining channels. Our simulation results prove that the parallel polling and the LMC switchover work well to offer smooth high-data rate to fast mobile users without handover latency though the radio resources is reduced somewhat for reservation. OMNeT++ simulation tool is used for our simulation performance.