A Novel Inter-FA Handover Scheme for Load Balancing in IEEE 802.16e System

As the demand for high data rate increases, load balancing across cell is highly desirable. A handover (HO) among frequency assignment (FA) may be possible for load balancing theoretically, when a serving FA is crowded to accommodate additional bandwidth request in such system as IEEE 802.16e, where the multiple FAs are possible. However, this handover is impossible in the current specification because an indication to target FA is not defined. It also requires unnecessary long scanning and network re-entry procedure. In this paper, we propose novel inter-FA handover, handover among FAs for load balancing by modifying general handover algorithm. It also satisfies HO user´s quality of service (QoS) by reducing HO latency, unnecessary scanning, and network re-entry. We compare with previous HO schemes for load balancing by simulation. We show that this HO scheme can achieve significantly better performance in HO user´s QoS and HO delay.