A handover scheme based on signal power of coordinated base stations for CoMP joint processing systems

The recent Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard only supports hard handover to reduce both the signaling overhead among base stations and the complexity of the LTE network architecture. In LTE-Advanced, coordinated multi-point (CoMP) is expected to improve the cell edge throughput and system throughput. Since a user equipment can have connections with multiple base stations at handover in CoMP systems, the suitable handover strategy may change. In this paper, we propose a handover scheme by extending the idea of the conventional handover scheme. By employing the average power of the received signals from the coordinated BSs instead of the power of the received signal from the source BS, the occurrence of handover can be postponed. Simulation results can show the proposed scheme reduces the number of handovers without degrading the handover performance.