Handoff Management in Macro-Femto Cellular Networks

With the rapid increase in data traffic and high data rate demands from cellular users, conventional cellular networks are becoming insufficient to fulfill these requirements. Femto cells are integrated in macro cellular network to increase the capacity, coverage, and to fulfill the increasing demands of the users. Time required for handoff process between the cells became more sensitive and complex with the introduction of femto cells in the network. Public internet which connect the femto base station with the mobile core network induces higher latency if conventional handoff procedures are also employed in macro-femto cell network. So, handoff process will become slower and network operation will become insufficient. Some standards, procedures, and protocols should be defined for macro-femto cell network rather than using existing protocols. This chapter presents a comprehensive survey of handoff process, types of handoff in macro-femto cell network, and proposed methods and schemes for frequent and unnecessary handoff reduction for efficient network operation.