Energy Efficient Mobility Management for the Macrocell – Femtocell LTE Network

Abstract

Femtocells will play a key role in future deployments of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) the Long Term Evolution (LTE) system, as they are expected to enhance system capacity, and greatly improve the energy-efficiency in a cost-effective manner. Due to the short transmit-receive distance, femtocells prolong handset battery life and enhance the Quality of Service (QoS) perceived by the end users. However, large-scale femtocell deployment comprises many technical challenges, mainly including security, interference and mobility management. Under the viewpoint of energy-efficient mobility management, this chapter discusses the key features of the femtocell technology and presents a novel energy-efficient handover decision policy for the macrocell – femtocell LTE network. The proposed HO decision policy aims at reducing the transmit power of the LTE mobile terminals in a backwards compatible with the standard LTE handover decision procedure. Simulation results show that significantly lower energy and power consumption can be attained if the proposed approach is employed, at the cost of a moderately increased number of handover executions events.