A mobility aware handover scheme for 4G LTE system

Abstract

Reduction in cell size in an ultra-dense network faces the challenge of increase in frequency of handovers and signaling overhead (mobility management) as well as inter-cell interference. Such frequent handovers leads to increased packet loss and blocking rate if the handover latency is very high, which have adverse effect on connectivity and performance. However, most existing schemes have the common characteristics of increasing spectral and energy efficiency due to increase in the number of micro cell on a network, thus decreases the general network performance. In this study, an improved scheme was developed for fixed mobility management pattern (FMP). A comparison module was established and an identifier algorithm that uses the user equipment international mobile equipment identity (IMEI) as a decisive component of its cell selection camping process was designed. Network simulator (NS-3) was used to study the impact of macro cell and inter site distance (ISD) on user throughput and battery life usage using mobility pattern of 3km/h, with A3 event based measurement for ISD 50, 150, 300, 500, and 1000 respectively. The performance evaluation metrics used are; reference signal received power (RSRP), flow monitor and handover time. The FMP results were compared with micro cell performance in an ultra-dense network. The RSRP result from FMP was higher than that of micro cell at ISD 50 and 150 respectively (-71.36, -73.97 and 83.77, 85.13). The handover time for FMP was higher than that of micro cell except for ISD 50 which was 50s and 51s respectively. The flow monitor of FMP showed a packet loss ratio of 0.0001 compare to 0.21 of micro cell. The battery life usage shows that FMP used 5943±8.7mw compare to micro cell which used 1680.2±15.7 mw. These results showed that FMP is efficient in managing the frequency of handover and battery life consumption for better connectivity and performance.