Fast game-based handoff mechanism with load balancing for LTE/LTE-A heterogeneous networks

Due to the development of femtocell technologies, indoor LTE/LTE-A signal quality can be significantly improved. However, since femtocells and macrocell are deployed into a coexisted heterogeneous network, handoff from macrocell to femtocell turns out to be one of the major design issues to achieve better user experience provided by femtocells. In general, the macrocell user equipment (MUE) selects a handoff target femtocell base station (FBS) in the handoff procedure solely based on the received signal strength indicator (RSSI), signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR), or signal to noise ratio (SNR). Although this approach is very simple and easy to implement, it can result in load imbalance among FBSs. Hence, this paper proposes a novel game-based handoff mechanism that combines the modified Dutch Auction (MDA) and stochastic election process (SEP) to jointly take the uplink and downlink signal qualities and load balance of the handoff candidate FBSs into consideration when selecting handoff target FBS. Besides, in order to speed up the execution of the handoff mechanism and reduce the percentage of handoff failures, the Fast SEP and Go Back B are further developed, respectively. Simulation results confirm that the proposed MDA+Fast SEP+Go Back B handoff mechanism provides better load balance, faster handoff and higher percentage of successful handoffs.