Reduction of handover failure for small cells in heterogeneous networks

Small cells are attractive nodes for building infrastructure with comparably reduced cost. To effectively deploy small cells in mobile networks, mobility performance is the main issue because of smaller coverage. The paper focuses on the reduction of handover failure when a mobile moves out of small cells, which has the highest handover failure rate. Proposed handover scheme reduces handover failure by minimizing interruption time for handover preparation. In addition, the mobile can directly connect to the target cell if the source cell´s channel condition goes below a threshold. Furthermore, the scheme can be provided with existing LTE handover procedure. To verify the performance of the proposed scheme, the latency for radio access is compared and the proposed scheme shows the minimization of handover interruption time.