Advanced handover techniques in LTE-Advanced system

There are always increasing demands of high speed data applications in wireless systems with fast and seamless access to voice and multimedia services and QoS guaranteed such as in Fourth Generation (4G) Long Term Evolution (LTE)-Advanced system. Moreover, as mobility speeds support is expected to reach up to 500 km/h, the handover will occur more frequent, thus the system performance in terms of delay and packet loss will be degraded. Hence, efficient radio resource management including handover techniques, load balancing and interference management are essential. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on the advanced handover techniques, requirements and features for LTE-Advanced system. Also, advanced handover techniques are highlighted and discussed such as Fractional Soft Handover (FSHO), Semi Soft Handover (SSHO) and multi-carrier handover (MCHO) that incorporate backward compatibility to the existing system. Meanwhile, FSHO technique based on CA with 5CCs are investigated in term of cell throughput and user's handover numbers. The result shows that, FSHO with 5 CCs improves LTE-Advanced system in term of cell throughput and numbers of user handover better than Non-CA. Consequently, the existing handover techniques that have been proposed have several advantages, but they are not sufficient to solve hard handover problems. Therefore, a new handover technique is essential required to support fast and seamless handover in LTE-Advanced system. As a result, an advanced handover technique is proposed by combining FSHO, SSHO, and MCHO techniques that can enhance the system performance in term of latency, outage probability and handover reliability especially at cell boundary. Also, the expected output from this hybrid technique can reduce transmission overhead on the network cells by balancing the traffic load in the network cells.