NASH: Navigation-assisted seamless handover scheme for LTE-A smallcell networks

The existing handover decision schemes in smallcell networks are mostly based on received signal strength (RSS) to make hangover decision. However, these schemes suffer from ping-pong effect and, as a result, perform unnecessary handovers incurring extra signaling overhead, which is even more exaggeratedly in the dense smallcell environment. Therefore, we propose a navigation-assisted seamless handover (NASH) scheme for reducing unnecessary handovers and ping-pong effect. We use the bicasting scheme with coordination multi-point (CoMP) and carrier aggregation (CA) techniques in handover procedure to avoid packet loss problem and enhance throughput. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme has the better performance in terms of handover latency, packet loss, network throughput, and the number of unnecessary handovers.