Reducing Unnecessary Handovers: Call Admission Control Mechanism for Handover between WiMAX Macrocells and Femtocells

Femtocells are capable of providing services in shadowed areas of the WiMAX macrocell (cell coverage enhancement) and can relieve traffic from the macrocell networks, reduce infrastructure costs for the network operators, allow for network capacity increase, and provide needed service quality in indoor environments. However, conventional handover methods cannot support a good enough performance under different mobility patterns and dynamic network conditions. Unnecessary handovers pose serious problems since it may cause reduction in the user’s QoS level and the system capacity. This work introduces an appropriate call admission control and proposes a resource management scheme that significantly reduce unnecessary handovers. Simulation results are shown to validate our performance predictions. Keywords-WiMAX Femtocell, Handover