Receiver Power Consumption during Handover in LTE

Recently, handover (HO) has gathered huge interest as the cellular mobile users desire for better quality of service (QoS) and continuous connection has increased. The power consumption is increasing day by day due to growing data rate demands of the users that directly impacts operators' operational expenditures (OPEX) and, not least, the environment by increased CO ₂ emissions. In this paper, we address the power consumption caused by the air-interface signaling messages received at both the eNB and User Equipment (UE) during HO in a Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular network. A receiver power consumption model is presented with a detailed quantitative analysis using system level simulations. Numerical results indicate that the largest contributor to received air-interface HO signaling overhead is the reception of the measurement report by the eNB.