Fade Duration Based Neighbor Cell List Optimization for Handover in Femtocell Networks

In a dense femtocell network, beyond co-tier and cross-tier interference mitigation, handover femtocell- femtocell and macrocell-femtocell is a major challenge. In order to perform successful handover, avoiding the scanning of a large neighbor list and shortening the handover period is required to identify the optimal neighbor. In this paper, a neighbor cell list optimization method based on fade duration along with an algorithm for open and hybrid femtocell networks is proposed. The proposed method considers fade duration outage probability (FDOP), distance between femtocell access points, and the operating frequency as benchmarks for optimization of the neighbor list selection process. FDOP determines a duration beyond which a connection is considered in an outage state. The simulation results based on this proposed method also show an improvement over previously proposed methods that create neighboring lists based on received signal and signal-to-noise ratio. Fade duration based optimization provides a much better prediction of traffic performance.