X2 based local mobility management for networked femtocells

One of the most attractive features considered by the recent LTE-A standard is the introduction of femtocells in its main architecture. Rapidly, femtocell technology has been recognized as a potential solution to offload cellular networks since its deployment is expected to grow up considerably in the near future. However, the small coverage of femtocells may lead to frequent handoffs that need permanent support of the core network. Hence, to ensure seamless handovers through such networks, local mobility management remains an important task to be addressed. In this paper, we propose an efficient X2-based local mobility scheme that allows mobile users to perform handovers with minimum signaling load compared to the mobility procedures proposed in the 3GPP LTE-A standard.