Load-based fast handoff mechanism for macro-femto heterogeneous networks

Abstract

When mobile multimedia applications are considered in a femtocell and macrocell coexisted heterogeneous network, a fast handoff mechanism to select a target femtocell base station (FBS) for macrocell user equipment (MUE) to maintain the QoS turns out to be a major design issue. To address this problem, a fast Stochastic Election Process (SEP) is proposed to assign the initial counter value of each candidate FBS based on the load of the candidate FBS. Simulation results confirm that the proposed load-based handoff mechanism reduces the handoff time greatly.