A Femtocell-Assisted Data Forwarding Protocol in Relay Enhanced LTE Networks

The femtocell networks, which is a small cellular base station in home and small business environment, is an attractive solution for operators to improve indoor coverage and network capability. In addition, relaying is one of the proposed technique for future releases of UTRAN Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks which aims to increase the coverage and capability of LTE networks. A LTE network is called as relay enhanced LTE network if the LTE network adopting the relays. A user can handover not only two relays, but also between relays and base stations, and two base stations. It is important to provide a seamlessly handover solution in the relay enhanced LTE network. During mobility, the packet loss problem is occurred if some packets are sent to the previous base station (or relay) when a user equipment (UE) is already handover to the current base station (or relay). To solve this problem, a data forwarding procedure is performed to re-direct these buffered packets from the previous base station (or relay) to the current base station (or relay). In this paper, we develop a new data forwarding protocol with the assistance of femtocells, called as a femtocell-assisted data forwarding, in the relay enhanced LTE networks to provide a seamlessly handover result with the low packet loss rate and the high throughput. Finally, the simulation results illustrate that our proposed protocol outperforms the existing data forwarding scheme.