Predictive Association Control for Frequent Handover Avoidance in Femtocell Networks

Abstract

Appropriate base station association decisions in dense femtocell networks help to improve throughput while reducing frequent handovers of mobile stations. We consider the association control problem of mobile stations as an optimal control problem and obtain a rolling-out suboptimal control policy which is based on the predictive mobility of mobile stations. In addition, we derive a simple and lightweight online association control policy for each mobile station. The simulation results show that the proposed method provides large gain in both handover frequency and throughput over the current methods.