Upper Bound Analysis of the Handover Performance in HetNets

摘要

Handover in heterogeneous networks (HetNets) is an interesting research challenge that has attracted considerable attention in recent years, producing a variety of handover schemes that are difficult to compare because they differ in the considered assumptions and target useretwork utility functions. Therefore, how much room is left for further optimization is quite unclear. In this letter, we propose a framework to derive an upper bound for the performance of handover in HetNets that can be used as a benchmark to compare different practical handover schemes. The approach computes the optimal handover strategy as a function of the user’s speed, cell size, and load conditions, under the ideal assumption of non-causal knowledge of the channels from terminal and base stations. The proposed framework is then used to provide a comparative performance analysis among some existing handover schemes.