Cell Association and Handover Management in Femtocell Networks

TL;DR

This paper addresses cell association and handover management in femtocell networks, proposing algorithms to optimize capacity, fairness, and reduce unnecessary handovers, validated through simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel algorithm for maximizing network capacity and fairness, along with a Bayesian-based handover algorithm to minimize unnecessary handovers in femtocell networks.

Findings

The proposed algorithms outperform heuristic schemes in simulations.

The handover algorithm significantly reduces unnecessary handovers.

The capacity and fairness are improved through the new cell association approach.

Abstract

Although the technology of femtocells is highly promising, many challenging problems should be addressed before fully harvesting its potential. In this paper, we investigate the problem of cell association and handover management in femtocell networks. Two extreme cases for cell association are first discussed and analyzed. Then we propose our algorithm to maximize network capacity while achieving fairness among users. Based on this algorithm, we further develop a handover algorithm to reduce the number of unnecessary handovers using Bayesian estimation. The proposed handover algorithm is demonstrated to outperform a heuristic scheme with considerable gains in our simulation study.