Fast handover in cellular networks with femtocells

With the advent of femtocells in cellular networks, the inter-cell handover process will become more complex, frequent and time-sensitive. The legacy handover procedures in 3G and LTE systems were originally designed for handovers between macrocells whose base stations are part of the mobile core networks. The use of the public internet to connect the femtocell base station with the mobile core network will contribute to higher latency if such legacy handover procedures are employed over femtocells. This makes the legacy handover procedures slower, and in most cases inefficient. In the absence of a specific standardized procedure that involves femtocells, rather than using existing procedures designed to handle handovers between macrocells, we propose a new Prefetch-based Fast Handover procedure that is designed to overcome the drawbacks introduced by the usage of the public internet for message paths between femtocell base stations and the mobile core network. The new procedure can be introduced into the existing LTE infrastructure with few modifications to the femtocell base station architecture, and the core network packet flows. The proposed procedure simplifies and speeds the handover procedure at the cost of consuming more network resources at the femtocell base station.