LTE seamless mobility demonstrated with combined cell in a heterogeneous network

The increased demand on capacity in cellular networks calls for increased site density and heterogeneous networks. With unchanged mobility pattern this will increase the handover rate, the signaling load and the impact from handover on experienced user quality. An attractive solution to mitigate the handover impact is Combined Cell which combines area splitting gain with seamless mobility. In this paper seamless mobility is demonstrated by measurements from a trial with a LTE Combined Cell prototype in a full scale heterogeneous network deployment. The downlink spatial reuse capacity is assessed to be close to separate cell deployment already with release 10 of LTE.