Femtocell Selection Scheme for Reducing Unnecessary Handover and Enhancing Downlink QoS in Cognitive Femtocell Networks

Femtocell networks have been proposed for indoor communications as the extension of cellular networks for enhancing coverage performance. Because femtocells have small coverage radius, typically from 15 to 30 meters, a femtocell user (FU) walking at low speed can still make several femtocell-to-femtocell handovers during its connection. When performing a femtocell-to-femtocell handover, femtocell selection used to select the target handover femtocell has to be able not only to reduce unnecessary handovers and but also to support FU’s quality of service (QoS). In the paper, we propose a femtocell selection scheme for femtocell-tofemtocell handover, named Mobility Prediction and Capacity Estimation based scheme (MPCE-based scheme), which has the advantages of the mobility prediction and femtocell’s available capacity estimation methods. Performance results obtained by computer simulation show that the proposed MPCE-based scheme can reduce unnecessary femtocell-tofemtocell handovers, maintain low data delay and improve the throughput of femtocell users. DOI: 10.32913/rd-ict.vol3.no14.536