Mobility and Handover Management for Heterogeneous Networks in LTE-Advanced

3GPP Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) aims at enhancement of LTE performance in many respects including the system capacity and network coverage. This enhancement can be accomplished by heterogeneous networks (HetNets) where additional micro-nodes that require lower transmission power are efficiently deployed. More careful management of mobility and handover (HO) might be required in HetNets compared to homogeneous networks where all nodes require the same transmission power. In this article, we provide a technical overview of mobility and HO management for HetNets in LTE-A. Moreover, we investigate the A3-event which requires a certain criterion to be met for HO. The criterion involves the reference symbol received power/quality of user equipment (UE), hysteresis margin, and a number of offset parameters based on proper HO timing, i.e., time-to-trigger (TTT). Optimum setting of these parameters are not trivial task, and has to be determined depending on UE speed, propagation environment, system load, deployed HetNets configuration, etc. Therefore, adaptive TTT values with given hysteresis margin for the lowest ping pong rate within 2 % of radio link failure rate depending on UE speed and deployed HetNets configuration are investigated in this article.