Load Balancing with Reduced Unnecessary Handoff in Energy Efficient Macro/Femto-cell based BWA Networks

Abstract: The hierarchical macro/femto cell based BWA networks are observed to be quite promising for mobile operators as it improves their network coverage and capacity at the outskirt of the macro cell. However, this new technology introduces increased number of macro/femto handoff and wastage of electrical energy which in turn may affect the system performance. Users moving with high velocity or undergoing real-time transmission suffers degraded performance due to huge number of unnecessary macro/femto handoff. On the other hand, huge amount of electrical energy is wasted when a femto BS is active in the network but remains unutilized due to low network load. Our proposed energy efficient handoff decision algorithm eliminates the unnecessary handoff while balancing the load of the macro and femto cells at minimal energy consumption. The performance of the proposed algorithm is analyzed using Continuous Time Markov Chain (CTMC) Model. In addition, we have also contributed a method to determine the balanced threshold level of the received signal strength (RSS) from macro base station (BS). The balanced threshold level provides equal load distribution of the mobile users to the macro and femto BSs. The balanced threshold level is evaluated based on the distant location of the femto cells for small scaled networks. Numerical analysis shows that threshold level above the balanced threshold results in higher load distribution of the mobile users to the femto BSs.