A MDP-based Energy Efficient and Delay Aware Handover Algorithm

This paper presents a novel energy efficient and delay aware handover decision policy based on Markov decision process (MDP) for a two-tier (macro-femto) wireless network. We propose a novel reward function and formulate a novel transition probability matrix to be used in MDP in order to take optimal handover decision. Simulation results reveal that, compared to other competitive handover policies, the proposed policy can significantly reduce the power consumption as well as handover delay at the mobile terminals.