MDP based handover decision algorithm for femtocells

Femtocells emerge as an alternate solution meeting the ever-increasing demand for high wireless data rates in a cost effective way. Nevertheless, femtocells are also sharing the same licensed UMTS frequencies with macrocells and they are deployed by end-users in ad hoc manner. The mobility management in the resulting macro-femto combined network should be performed according to the characteristics of this asymmetric interaction. The presented study proposes an optimal MDP based handover decision mechanism that takes into account important interaction factors. Through simulations, the performance of the novel algorithm has been compared to the state-of-art methods. The results show that end-user QoS and the ratio of utilization for femtocell network increase in significant manner.