Enhanced handoff scheme based on efficient uplink quality estimation in LTE-Advanced system

Asymmetric traffics cause downlink–uplink asymmetric interference. It can lead to a critical unbalance between a downlink and an uplink channel qualities in cell edge areas. This paper proposes an enhanced handoff scheme including an efficient uplink channel estimation method. The proposed handoff scheme determines an appropriate handoff-timing and handoff-direction according to an estimated uplink channel quality and a measured downlink channel quality. In the proposed scheme, an uplink or downlink, whose quality dominantly affects a link failure, becomes the main handoff-criterion. An efficient uplink channel estimation method is also proposed to exploit an uplink channel quality in handoff. The proposed method estimates an uplink signal strength from the measured downlink signal strength and predicts an uplink interference based on the interference-level information from neighbor base stations. We propose two different uplink estimation modes such as the simple and the precise modes. The simple estimation mode calculates the uplink channel quality for the overall bandwidth for a general handoff process. The precise estimation mode finds the best uplink band for the handoff user who wants an elaborate handoff process. In the elaborate handoff, a target base station allocates the best uplink band to a handoff user to provide the better uplink channel quality. Simulation results show that the proposed uplink estimation method can accurately compute the uplink channel quality of neighbor cells where the estimation error rate is less than 0.7% The simulation results also show that the proposed handoff scheme reduces handoff-call-dropping probability by up to 69% compared to LTE-Advanced system. In addition, the end-to-end delay of the proposed scheme can be better than that of LTE-Advanced system by 26%.