Cell coverage area information service to improve cell selection in HetNets

Information services providing diverse information about networks and their services have been widely cited as one of the key factors to better utilize the heterogeneous network environment. However, the current information services do not properly enable determining the base stations that reside within the range and close-by of a mobile device. The serving range of base stations can only be roughly estimated. Moreover, large variation in cell sizes bring additional challenges with respect to mobility management. In this study, a network information service allowing mobile devices to query for information about base station cells near their location is utilized in cell selection. A spatial database is used to store the coverage area geometries of base stations and the base station coverage area and distance information is utilized in cell selection. The paper presents a clustering method for grouping the cells found in the vicinity of a mobile terminal based on the coverage area and their distance to the terminal, which improves the handover target discovery in a dense cell environment. In pedestrian mobility, mobile network operators likely prefer the use of cells with short range for traffic load balancing purposes. Favoring large cells in the high-speed vehicular mobility, the results show that the number of handovers can be significantly decreased, even cut to half from that attained with the conventional cell selection scheme.