The Effect of Overlapping Area on Ping-Pong Handover in LTE Networks

Abstract

Handover (HO) technique in LTE networks suffers from Ping-pong movement. Ping-pong HO can reduce the quality of the mobile user’s connection and increases the numbers of handovers which in turn raises the network load and generally degrades the network performance.   The work aims to present a novel approach to reduce the undesirable effects of ping-pong HO in LTE Mobile Networks using timer. The study focused on the ping-ping phenomenon taking into account maintained the dropped calls rates at lowest levels. The optimal timer values are determined based on the width of overlapping area, user velocity and type of eNodeB.  Analyzed results showed that the changes of overlapping area directly affect the timer values of the proposed algorithm. Optimal timer value should be selected precisely according to the width of the overlapping area, user velocity and timer value in order to reduce the ping-pong HO.