Advanced Mobility Management for Reduced Interference and Energy Consumption in the Two-tier LTE-Advanced Network

Femtocell deployment will play a key role for the wide adoption of LTE-Advanced, as it brings the access network closer to the end user in a cost-effective manner. This disruptive communication paradigm, however, necessitates the employment of advanced interference and mobility management to cope with the comparably denser yet unplanned network layout. This paper describes an advanced mobility management approach for the two-tier LTE-Advanced network, aiming to resourcefully utilize the femtocell superior characteristics in an energy-efficient and interference-aware manner. The key features of the proposed approach are (a) the exchange and utilization of standard signal quality measurements during the handover decision phase, to accurately estimate the mean user equipment (UE) transmit power on a per candidate cell basis, and (b) the use of a novel handover decision algorithm that jointly considers the impact of interference, power consumption, and user mobility. A comprehensive analysis of the required network signaling is provided, while extensive simulation results demonstrate that compared to existing approaches, the proposed approach attains improved performance at the cost of moderate increase of network signaling.