Performance Analysis of Handover Strategy in Femtocell Network Azita Laily Yusof, Siti Sabariah Salihin, Norsuzila Ya’acob, and Mohd Tarmizi Ali Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Shah Alam, Selangor, Malaysia Email: azita968@salam.uitm.edu.my, sabariah@psa.edu.my, norsuzilayaacob@yahoo.com, mizi732002@yahoo.com Abstract—Femtocells, as known as HeNB is the tremendous network technology in the Long Term Evolution (LTE) network in order to fulfill the upcoming demand of high data rates. However, Femtocells deployment may cause the incidence of frequent and unnecessary handover due to the movement of the user. As Femtocells coverage area is very small and deployed randomly, there are many possible targets Femtocells for handover. This paper analyzed on the performance analysis of handover strategy in Femtocells network under Hybrid Access Mode to minimize the unnecessary handover. The handover strategy for three different threshold stay time with considering the velocity of user equipment (UE) in the mobility are analyzed. The simulation results showed that the proposed algorithm minimized the number of handover and decreased the unnecessary handover probability. Simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm has a better performance as compare with the traditional strategy Index Terms—femtocells, handover, hybrid access mode, threshold stay time, velocity. I. INTRODUCTION Nowadays, the recent dramatic growth in mobile traffic requires new wireless communication systems that increase network capacity. LTE is one of the tremendous technologies for future deployment of cellular networks and wireless communication system that increase network capacity. The development concept of home base stations, so called Femtocells have come into the spotlight as a solution to improve the quality of services and to increase data rates in residential or enterprise environments. The LTE Femtocells is small home base station represented by a Femtocells Access Point (FAP), which is supposed to be deployed especially indoor (e.g. in households, in offices, or in shopping centers). Femtocells are a low-power access point in a building that combine wireless mobile and Internet broadband technologies as shown in Fig. 1. The FAPs is connected to an operator’s backbone via a wired line such as xDSL or optical fiber [1] to the cable modem. The main purpose of the FAPs are to improve signal quality indoor or in shadowed areas, to increase throughput in areas with high density of users, and to offload the Macrocell Base Stations (eNB) [2]. This work was supported by the e-Science grant no. 01-01-01- SF0407 funded by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation and Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi MARA. Femtocells allow service providers extend service coverage indoors, especially where access is limited or unavailable. It generates mobile phone signal and connected to the Internet through a network operator. Standard of LTE Femtocells has been discussed in the Femto Forum [3] and 3GPP releases [4]-[7]. Figure 1. Typical femtocells deployment scenario There are some issues in order to integrate Femtocells/Macrocell, since the existing cellular networks architecture is very different from Femtocells architecture. This paper focused on the handover issue in three ways of scenarios Femtocells handover procedure, i.e., Macrocell to Femtocells handover (Hand In), Femtocells to Macrocell handover (Hand Out) and Inter-Femtocells handover procedure based on 3GPP LTE specification [7] as shown in Fig. 2. Figure 2. Handover scenarios in femtocells network The handover procedure is related to the Femtocells Access Mode. There are three access modes which allow 724 Journal of Communications Vol. 8, No. 11, November 2013 ©2013 Engineering and Technology Publishing doi:10.12720/jcm.8.11.724-729 Manuscript received June 10, 2013; revised October 14, 2013.