Research PaperNo Access

Multi-Objective Handoff Scheme for Macro/Femto WiMAX Networks

Lamiaa Menshawy

Computer Science Department, Port Said University, Port Said 42523, Egypt

E-mail Address: Lamyaa_menshawy@himc.psu.edu.eg

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Heba Nashaat

http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0112-0648

Electrical Engineering Department, Port Said University, Port Said 42523, Egypt

E-mail Address: Hebanashaat@eng.psu.edu.eg

Corresponding author.

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, and

Rawya Rizk

Electrical Engineering Department, Port Said University, Port Said 42523, Egypt

E-mail Address: r.rizk@eng.psu.edu.eg

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https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218126619500166Cited by:1 (Source: Crossref)

Abstract

Femtocell plays a significant role in technologies to improve service quality and data rates for indoor mobile users. It is the recent less expensive concept that provides better indoor coverage. Therefore, handoff process from macrocell to femtocell is an open research issue. In this paper, an adaptive macro/femto handoff scheme is proposed. It takes into consideration the velocity of mobile station, load balancing and the accessing mode of the target cell. It effectively handles the indoor handoff situations by checking user velocity which has to be lower than a threshold value in order to guarantee that this user has a sufficient time to switch from macrocell to femtocell. The proposed scheme aims to achieve load balancing between macrocells and femtocells. It also minimizes the number of femtocells in the neighbor cell list. The target femtocell is predicted based on the direction of the mobile user considering the femtocells accessing mode. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme improves femtocell usage and decreases the handoff latency and the total handoff delay compared to the standard macrocell-to-femtocell handoff process and other existing schemes.

This paper was recommended by Regional Editor Zoran Stamenkovic.

Keywords:

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