Adaptive cost-based handover decision algorithm for user equipment battery-life aware load balancing in LTE network

Abstract

The demand for higher data rate and lower cost is making the use of Long Term Evolution (LTE network) more popular in recent years. In this paper, we deal with an adaptive cost-based handover decision algorithm for user equipment battery-life aware load balancing in LTE. The algorithm has a simple cost function decision engine to reduce computational complexity and network overhead while load balancing and optimizing the battery life of the user’s equipment. The cost function comprises of load and power related parameters which are cell load, uplink transmission power as well as Reference signal received power (RSRP). A weight factor (bounded between zero and one) for each cost function parameter has an initial (constant) or adaptive (dynamic) value depending on the user equipment battery’s state of charge. Whenever the algorithm is run, a cell with dominant cost value is chosen to serve as the new target cell so as to avoid load imbalance of the network. The parameters for performance testing are handover and new call blocking rate, the number of handovers and load distribution index. The proposed algorithm is compared with two related works. Results obtained show that the proposed algorithm has better performance over the other two schemes compared. In particular, over 90% is achieved in terms of load distribution index which is higher than that of the two other schemes compared.