Efficient SON handover scheme for enterprise Femtocell networks

Abstract

Femtocells are used in indoors to improve the coverage and data rates of the mobile users. In Enterprise building having high deployment of femtocells, users keep moving from place to place inside the building. As a result existing handover schemes lead to a lot of handovers. These handovers are happen to provide seamless connectivity. However, some of the handovers can happen at locations where user mobility is constrained and therefore unnecessary. These unnecessary handovers can even lead to considerable packet loss, decrease in system throughput and high signaling cost. Mitigating these unnecessary handovers requires the notion of location and user mobility in indoor environment. In this paper, we propose an efficient self-organizing network (SON) based handover scheme to mitigate unnecessary handovers with the help of estimated user position information. Simulation carried out in NS-3 show that our proposed scheme achieves 31% improvement in reducing handover delay compared to an existing scheme.