Cost-aware Handover Decision Algorithm for

Cooperative Cellular Relaying Networks

Tong Wu
1,2
, Jing Huang
1,2
, Xinmin Yu
1,2
, Xinchun Qu
1
, YingWang
1,2
1: Wireless Technology Innovation Institute, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
2: Key Laboratory of Universal Wireless Communications, Ministry of Education
P.O. Box 92, BUPT, 100876
Beijing, P.R. China
Email: tong.wu.wti@gmail.com
AbstractThe cooperative cellular relaying network is expected to
achieve the higher capacity and enlarge the coverage. In this
paper, a novel cost-aware handover decision algorithm (CHDA)
for cooperative cellular relaying networks is proposed. Two cost
functions, namely the triggering and priority decision cost
functions are exploited, which involves the signal transmission
quality, the handover signaling cost, the handover latency and
the interference estimation. Simulation results show that the
signaling overhead and the handover delay decrease significantly
by utilizing the CHDA scheme. It is also proved that the CHDA
strategy is an efficient method to achieve the tradeoff among the
QoS requirements and the system overheads, which can
remarkably enhance the system performance.
Keywords- cooperative relay, cost-aware handover decision, cost
function, quality of service.
I. INTRODUCTION
The concept of relaying has emerged as a feasible option for
challenging the tradeoff between the transmission range and
the end-to-end data rate transmission [1]. Relay-enabled
standards have already been considered in the IEEE 802
family such as IEEE 802.11s-WLAN, IEEE 802.16j-WMAN
and IEEE 802.20-MBWA. Additionally, the WINNER project
is also developing a relay-enabled deployment concept for the
next generation broadband mobile radio access. Therefore,
cooperative cellular relaying network is a promising solution
for the future wireless communication.
However, the deployment of relay nodes (RNs) introduces
several issues. One of the most challenging issues is the
handover (HO) protocol, which can naturally be regarded as a
routing problem in relaying networks essentially. Recently,
some literatures have studied the effect of the routing protocol
for the system capacity in the hybrid relaying networks. Ref.[2]
presents the single-relay selection algorithms based on the
pathloss. The routing algorithms for cellular relaying networks
with hotspot cell are discussed in [3], in which the mobile
terminal in hotspot cell can have access to another cell via free
channels. Hsien-Po Shiang proposes a distributed dynamic
routing scheme, called the self-learning policy, which selects
the routing relays for wireless mesh networks in [4]. A joint
routing and re-routing control strategy is studied in
Centralized Architecture (CA) and Decentralized Architecture
(DA) for relaying networks in [5]. However, most researches
have not involved the HO decision scheme, and the routing
selection strategy is mainly based on the quality of link while
ignores the other aspects. Moreover, [6] investigates the inter-
cell HO scheme utilizing cell ID in the multi-hop networks
based on the IEEE 802.16e system, but the evaluations have
not involved the HO latency and signaling cost.
This paper focuses on a two-hop cooperative cellular
relaying system with fixed relays and investigates the problem
of how to guarantee the QoS in a mobile and fading
environment through proper HO schemes. The contributions
of this paper are: 1) Firstly, we propose a modified relay
channel allocation strategy aiming to improve the resource
utilization. 2) An effective cost-aware HO decision algorithm
(CHDA) is presented based on novel cost functions, by
considering the average received signal quality, the HO
signaling cost, and the HO latency.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In section II,
the network architecture and the relaying channel allocation
strategy are described. The detailed CHDA algorithm is
illustrated in section III. In section IV, the performance
evaluation criteria are presented. The dynamic simulation
results are given in section V. Finally, the conclusions are
drawn in Section VI.
II. SYSTEM MODEL
A. Architechture of Cellular Relaying Networks
The fixed two-hop cellular relaying network is described in
Figure 1. Each BS is located at the center of the cell and six
fixed relay nodes (RNs) are placed uniformly around the BS.
Each RN is located at 2/3 radius away from the BS to achieve
the optimal performance [7].
There are two alternative ways to transmit signals in the
relaying system. One is the traditional direct link and the other
is a relaying approach in which the mobile station (MS)
communicates with the BS via a RN. Since the deployment of
RNs introduces more interference sources, the relaying channel
allocation, affecting the resource utilization and interference
mitigation, is discussed in the next subsection.
B. Relaying Channel Allocation
In two-hop cellular relaying networks, the first and second
hop should occupy different resources due to the half-duplex
constraint. In order to aviod excessive interference, a RN is
This paper is financed by Ericsson Company, and also supported by National
Natural Science Foundation of China (60496312).
978-1-4244-1645-5/08/$25.00 2008 IEEE 2446
Figure 1. Two-hop cooperative cellular relaying network model
not allowed to reuse any channel in the same cell, but can
reuse a part of the channels from the cell farthest from it in
one cluster. Furthermore, all channels in a certain cell are
equally divided into several groups and each relay can only
reuse channels from one group. In [3], the channels in one cell
are divided into N groups (N is the number of RN in one cell),
and the channels in the neighbor RNs can not be shared, which
reduces the channel utilization efficiency, especially when the
traffic is non-uniformly distributed. For the sake of solving the
above problem, the three neighbor RNs should share the same
group of channels with each other so as to balance the traffic
load. Referring to Figure 1, a certain channel group is shared
by the three RNs in one triangle area. For example, the RNs in
triangle
1
and triangle
2
will share the same channels with the
RN
1
, RN
2
, RN
3
and RN
4
in cell 3, 4, 6 and 7 respectively. Thus,
the problem of load balance can be solved effectively and the
frequency utilization will be improved.
III. COST-AWARE HANDOVER DECISION ALGORITHM
Radio resource management (RRM) is very important to
exploit the advantage of the cellular relaying networks,
especially for the HO problem. An improperly designed HO
algorithm can result in unacceptably high level bouncing or
high probability of the connection termination or packet lost.
Figure 2. Handover types in cellular relaying networks
Compared to the traditional cellular networks, the integrated
cellular relaying networks induce more HO types due to the
deployment of relays (Shown in Figure 2). There are totally
seven HO types in two-hop relaying system (See Table I).
Different HO modes involve different signal quality, HO delay,
signaling costs and the interference influence.
A novel HO scheme named CHDA is proposed in this
section. It contains two steps, namely the HO triggering
strategy and the HO priority decision process. In each step, a
novel cost function is developed.
A. Handover Triggering Strategy in CHDA
In two-hop cellular relaying networks, for each MS, the
novel HO triggering cost function
1
f is defined as:
1 wt
f S P T = + , (1)
where S denotes the signaling cost induced by the handover,
P denotes the received power and
wt
T denotes the HO latency
time. , and are the weight factors, where 1 + + = .
The value of S is determined by the signaling cost of the
different HO types. There are three types of intra-cell HO
schemes and four inter-cell HO cases in relaying networks. In
order to calculate the signaling cost for each HO type, we
define the signaling messages as follows:
BSCh_REQ: the BS channel setup request in the other cell.
BSCh_ACK: the BS channel setup acknowledge.
BSChRL_REQ: the BS channel release request.
BSChRL_ACK: the BS channel release acknowledge.
RNCh_REQ: the RN channel setup request.
RNCh_ACK: the RN channel setup acknowledge.
RNChRL_REQ: the RN channel release request.
RNChRL_ACK: the RN channel release acknowledge.
BS_REQ: the BS setup request in the home cell.
BS_ACK: the acknowledge of the BS.
Reroute_REQ: the routing table update request.
Reroute_ACK: the routing table update acknowledge.
Due to the limited length of this paper, only the flowcharts
of intra-cell HO from RN to BS and the inter-cell HO from
RN to RS are given to explain how to calculate S . See Fig.3
and Fig.4, where GW_CP and GW_UP represent the control
plane and user plane of the Gateway respectively.
The value of
m
S ( 1, 2,...7 m = ) is then determined according
to the flowcharts. For example, the value of
1
S is 6 on account
of the number of signaling, which denotes the intra-cell HO
from RN to BS (Shown in Figure 3). For convenience of the
manipulation, S needs to be represented in a log form as:
10log
dB m
m
BM
S
S
S
| |
=
|
\ .
, (2)
where
1 BM
S S = for benchmark. According to (2), all the
signaling costs of different type of HO scenarios are shown in
Table I. Accordingly, the parameter P is also defined as:
10log
dB i
i
BM
P
P
P
| |
=
|
\ .
, (3)
where
i
P is the received power from the i th target node.
BM
P
represents the lowest power received from the target set .
If the HO strategy is implemented without considering
signaling cost, too much signaling cost will cause the
performance degradation of the relaying network. The novel
cost function will make the tradeoff between the signal quality
gain and the HO signaling cost first.
Besides, when the HO target is overloaded, the HO request to
2447
Figure 3. Handover triggering process of intra-cell RN-BS HO
TABLE I. EVALUATION OF HANDOVER COST
HO types Source-Target Signaling cost (S) Release gain (G)
Intra HO BS-RN 6 (0dB) 1/2 (-3dB)
Intra HO RN-BS 6 (0dB) 2/1 (3dB)
Intra HO RN-RN 8 (1.25dB) 2/2 (0dB)
Inter HO BS-BS 8 (1.25dB) 1/1 (0dB)
Inter HO BS-RN 10 (2.22dB) 1/2 (-3dB)
Inter HO RN-BS 10 (2.22dB) 2/1 (3dB)
Inter HO RN-RN 12 (3dB) 2/2 (0dB)
the target is keeping on a failed state until the HO target has free
channels. It may lead to intolerable delay. Therefore, the HO
latency time
wt
T is considered in the cost function of the HO
triggering process. Similarly, the latency
wt
T is also defined as:
10log
dB wt i
wt i
BM
T
T
T

| |
=
|
\ .
, (4)
where
BM
T represents the lowest latency time w.r.t. all the
potential target nodes. Thereby resorting to the cost function,
the HO latency time of the HO process can be controlled.
Therefore, the serving node whose cost function has the
minimum value is chosen as the HO target. The HO triggering
strategy is described as follows:
1. The number of the RN and BS in the candidate set is
initialized. The candidate set is chosen based on the
average received power, then
(1) ( ) ( )
1 1 1
{ , , , , }
i I
f f f = .
2. The cost of each link in the candidate set is calculated
based on the cost function defined in (1).
3. The cost of the current link was calculated based on the
equation below:
1_ local
f P = , (5)
where P is the average received power of the current link.
4. The hysteretic threshold value
k
lag of each link is
calculated based on the HO type, where 1 k = denotes
the Intra-cell HO, 2 k = denotes the Inter-cell HO.
5. BS (or RN) with the minimum cost function is chosen.
( ) ( )
1 1 1
_ { },
i i
f min min f f = (6)
( )
1
_ { }
i
i min arg min f = . (7)
If
1 1
_ _
k
f min lag f local + < , _ i min is chosen as the HO
target. Then the available channel is scanned. If there exist
free channels to establish the new link, the MS will handover
to the target node. Else, the MS will keep the current link.
B. Handover Priority Decision Process in CHDA
In the heavy traffic networks, many MSs may send out HO
requests to the same target at the same time leading to the
Figure 4. Handover triggering process of inter-cell RN-RN HO
performance degradation. For the sake of the efficient HO
process, a priority decision scheme is proposed with two
aspects. One is the quality of the signal of the current link, the
other is the potential interference produced by the link shift.
According to the transmission model in Section II, relay users
bring more interference than single hop users due to the reuse
operation for the second hops. We define a resource release
gain G to describe the channel resource utilization difference
before and after the HO, which is written as:
10log
dB i be
i
i af
l
G
l

| |
=
|
|
\ .
, (8)
where
i be
l

and
i af
l

are the link number of the user before
and after the HO operation. The value of, G corresponding to
different HO scenarios, is also shown in Table I. Hence the
cost function
2
f for priority decision can be expressed as:
2
(1 )
rel cur
f SIR G

= , (9)
where is the weight factor which is changing with the
different weight of the two parameters.
rel cur
SIR

denotes the
relative SIR gain between the current link (
cur
SIR ) and the
link with the highest SIR (
BM
SIR ) in the HO candidate set
10log
cur
rel cur
BM
SIR
SIR
SIR

| |
=
|
\ .
. (10)
The priority of HO process is based on the cost function at
every instant. That is to say, all the HO requests are queuing
according to the cost function, and the HO request with lowest
cost has the top-priority.
IV. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION CRITERIA
A. Handover Latency and Signaling Cost
Define HO D to be the average delay (second per user) and
total
S as the total signaling overhead. Assume that
, m n
t is the
HO latency time in m th HO type of n th MS, 1, 2,...7 m = .
Moreover,
m
u denotes the number of the users in the mth HO
type, and
m
S is the signaling overhead exchanging for each
HO type. It is easy to get these relations as follows:
, , , ,
, , ,
(
) / _
HO
inter BS BS inter BS RN inter RN BS inter RN RN
intra BS RN intra RN BS intra RN RN
D D D D D
D D D user num


= + + +
+ + +
7 7
,
1 1 1
/
m
u
m n m
m n m
t u
= = =
| |
=
|
\ .
__ _
, (11)
2448
total inter intra
S S S = +
_ _
7
1
m m
m
u S
=
=
_
. (12)
B. Signaling Cost to Capcity Ratio(SCR)
Suppose that
d
is the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) of
the direct link, and
1
,
2
represent the SIR of the first hop
and the second hop of the relaying users respectively. The
capacity of the k th user adopting decode-and-forward (DF)
mode can be expressed as below [7].
2
2 1 2 2
log (1 )
1 1
min log (1 ), log (1 )
2 2
k d
k
k k
B k D
C
B B k R
+

=

+ +
`

)
,(13)
where
k
B is the bandwidth allocated to the k th user. k D
means it is a direct user while k R means relaying user.
In order to evaluate the fairness of CDHA strategy, the
signaling cost to capacity ratio (SCR) is proposed as follows:
7
1
_
m m
m
k
k
u S
Signaling cost
SCR
Capacity C
=
= =
_
_
. (14)
V. SIMULATION RESULTS
A. Propagation Model
The average large-scale pathloss is adopted as
2
0
10
0
4
10
c
L
d f d
P
c d

| | | |
=
| |
\ .
\ .
, (15)
where
c
f is the carrier frequency in Hz, c is the speed of light
given in meters/s, is the pathloss exponent, and
0
d is the
reference distance at free space. is a Gaussian distributed
random variable with zero mean and standard deviation . The
auto-correlation function of shadowing is exponential [8],
2
1 2 1 2
( ( ) ( )) exp( / )
c
E d d d d d = , (16)
where
c
d determines how fast the correlation decays with the
distance.
B. Simulation Results and Analysis
The dynamic simulation is utilized to evaluate the
performance of the proposed CHDA algorithm and the wrapa
round method is adopted to avoid the edge effect. The system
under investigation consists of 7 clusters, each of which
contains 4 cells, as shown in Figure 1. The main simulation
parameters are listed in Table II. Besides, the priority decision
strategy is fixed and the weight factor is assumed to be 0.5.
We mainly focus on the impact of the triggering strategy with
various , and .
Figure 5 gives the result of the channel capacity under
different traffic load. It can be seen that when CHDA strategy
does not consider the effect of the signaling ( 0 = ), the
channel capacity is almost the same no matter the HO latency
TABLE II. SIMULATION PATAMETERS
Parameter Values
Reuse Factor 4
Cell radius 500 m
RN radius 500*(2/3) m
Number of RNs in One Circle 6
Standard Deviation of Shadowing 8 dB
Pathloss Exponent for Home Cell
(BS-MS; BS-RN; RN-MS)
(4; 2.5; 3.5)
Pathloss Exponent for Other Cells 4
Carrier Frequency f 2 GHz
Reference Distance d0 10 m
Downlink Max BS/RN Power 1 watt / 0.2 watt
Noise power each channel -132 dBm
Channels per Cell 24
MS average speed 5 m/s
Transmission bandwidth 2 MHz
Hysteretic threshold of inter-/ intra- 3 dB / 2 dB
time is considered ( 1/ 2 = ) or not ( 0 = ). This indicates
that the channel capacity is not sensitive to the HO latency
time scheme. It is easy to find that the channel capacity will
decrease when considering the signaling overhead, which is
because that the scheme with 0 tends to achieve the
tradeoff between signal quality and signaling overhead.
Therefore, the capacity performance may be sacrificed in
order to decrease the signaling overhead. In addition, the HO
latency time affects the capacity obviously. Figure 6 shows the
average HO delay under different traffic load. It can be seen
that the average HO delay decreases a lot when 0 . It
denotes that the HO delay performance is quite sensitive to
HO latency time in triggering cost function.
In Figure 7, the total signaling overhead is equal to the
product of the handover rate of each HO type and the
signaling overhead of each type. The HO signaling overhead
of each type is set to be the number of the signaling exchanged
among the nodes, including MS, serving nodes and target
nodes. The result shows that when the CHDA strategy
considers the effect of the signaling and the HO latency time,
the HO signaling overhead decreases obviously.
The performance comparisons of SCR are shown in Figure
8. The values of SCR decrease when either the signaling cost
or the HO latency time is considered, and the performance is
more sensitive to the HO latency time than the signaling.
When the signaling and the HO latency time are both
considered in the CHDA strategy, the system has the best
performance with lowest SCR among the different schemes.
VI. CONCLUSION
This paper has addressed the handover problem in the
cooperative cellular relaying system. In the HO procedure, not
only average received power, but also the HO signaling
overhead, HO latency time cost and interference influence are
considered. The simulation results present that the system HO
2449
14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22
1.1
1.2
1.3
1.4
1.5
1.6
1.7
1.8
1.9
Number of users per cell
C
a
p
a
c
i
t
y
(
b
p
s
/
H
z
)
RP-based : =0, =1, =0
Cost f-based : =0, =1/2, =1/2
Cost f-based : =1/2, =1/2, =0
CHDA : =1/4, =1/2, =1/4
Figure 5. Average channel capacity ( 1/ 2 = )
14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22
0
0.02
0.04
0.06
0.08
0.1
0.12
Number of users per cell
T
h
e

a
v
e
r
a
g
e

d
e
l
a
y

o
f

t
h
e

s
y
s
t
e
m
(
s
)
RP-based : =0, =1, =0
Cost f-based : =0, =1/2, =1/2
Cost f-based : =1/2, =1/2, =0
CHDA : =1/4, =1/2, =1/4
Figure 6. The average handover delay ( 1/ 2 = )
signaling overhead decreases significantly when the signaling
and HO latency time cost are considered. Furthermore, the HO
delay decreases obviously and the MSs which handover to the
overload cell can be efficiently transferred to other free cells
when the HO latency time cost is considered. The system has
the best performance in terms of SCR when the CHDA
strategy takes into account both the signaling overhead and the
HO latency time. Therefore, the CHDA algorithm with cost
function can efficiently guarantee MSs QoS requirements.
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14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22
0
500
1000
1500
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Number of users per cell
H
O

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