IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 20, NO.
1, JANUARY 2016
Reduced Early Handover for Energy Saving in LTE Networks
Kapil Kanwal and Ghazanfar A. Safdar
AbstractLong-term evolution (LTE) facilitates users with high
data rate at the cost of increased energy consumption. eNodeBs
are main energy hungry elements in LTE networks. Since power
consumption directly affects the operational expenditure, thus the
provision of cost effective services with adequate quality of service
(QoS) has become a major challenge. This letter exploits the phe-
nomenon of handover and presents a novel hybrid idea of reduced
early handover with bandwidth expansion to achieve improved
energy saving in LTE networks. Through system level simulations,
the effectiveness of the proposed scheme is demonstrated. It is
shown that the proposed energy saving scheme achieves around
35% energy efficiency compared to benchmark and other state of
the art while still maintaining acceptable level of radio link failure.
Index TermsEnergy saving, LTE, 3GPP, handover, hysteresis.
I. I NTRODUCTION
C ONSIDERABLE research work has contributed towards
energy saving (ES) in LTE networks. In a distributed
energy efficient load balancing framework, Base stations (BSs)
consider traffic load in to account and mutually cooperate for
effective load distribution thereby resulting into improved ES
through adjustment of power levels [1]. Energy saving can
also be achieved through migration of user equipments (UEs)
to lightly loaded neighbor cells and eventually turning off the
candidate BSs [2][4]. Relay based configurations have sim-
ilarly been employed to achieve load balancing for heavily
loaded BSs leading towards increased energy saving with ade-
quate quality of service [5]. Seamless connectivity in cellular
networks is simply possible through the process of handover.
However, handover progression empowers itself through sev-
eral key parameters such as hysteresis, time to trigger (TTT),
offset etc [6]. Nevertheless it is important to minimize radio link
failure (RLF) due to handover [7]. On the same lines, notion
of early and late handovers has been looked into achievement
of reduced RLF [8]. The research work presented in our let-
ter takes the idea of early handover further and incorporates it
with bandwidth expansion, thereby resulting into a novel cross
layer based hybrid energy saving scheme for LTE networks.
Through fine tuning of the handover parameters (hysteresis,
TTT), the proposed energy saving scheme embraces the con-
cept of reduced early handover, thus resulting into around 7.5%
lesser energy. However the hybrid scheme, when merged with
bandwidth expansion [9], results into about 35% energy saving
in relation to benchmark and other state of art systems.
The rest of the letter is organized as follows: Proposed
scheme is presented in section II, whereas system model
Manuscript received September 25, 2015; accepted November 18, 2015. Date
of publication December 17, 2015; date of current version January 7, 2016.
The associate editor coordinating the review of this paper and approving it for
publication was M. A. Imran.
The authors are with the Department of Computer Science and
Technology, University of Bedfordshire, Luton LU13JU, U.K. (e-mail: ghaz-
anfar.safdar@beds.ac.uk).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LCOMM.2015.2503280
1558-2558 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
153
described in section III. Performance analysis is provided in
section IV before the letter is finally concluded in section V.
II. R EDUCED E ARLY H ANDOVER
The objective of early handover in our proposed hybrid
scheme is to save overall energy of eNodeBs, while still main-
taining acceptable RLF. Every BS broadcasts cell specific
reference signals (RSs) to all UEs in its coverage area. UEs
can estimate or measure the necessary handover using reference
signals received power known as RSRP. RSRP is inversely pro-
portional to the distance between BSs and UEs. Low RSRP
refers to weak link, and continuous reduction in RSRP leads
toward radio link failure. As shown in Fig. 1, UEs of cell A
moving towards cell B start receiving cell specific RS from
neighbour cell B when they enter in overlapping area. The par-
ticular UE then calculates RSRP for neighbour cell B along
with current serving cell A. Referring to Fig. 1, when UE
reaches at intersection point; its distance becomes equal for
both cells (A & B). Importantly, when UE crosses this inter-
section line, neighbour cells RSRP becomes better than current
serving cell. At this point UE generates RSRP report (A3 event)
and sends it to current serving cell. Considering 3GPP stan-
dard, hysteresis and offset are used to push user further inside
the coverage for target cell B, to possibly reduce radio link fail-
ure rate. It is worth noting that at intersection point (Fig. 1)
both cells (A & B) have ability to serve the UEs. However as
proposed in our scheme, hysteresis could be reduced at certain
level to perform early handover which will help in prompt turn-
ing Off of idle resources of current serving cell (A) thereby
resulting in improved energy saving. This fact is demonstrated
further in Fig. 2 below and proven through system simulations
in section IV. Referring to Fig. 1, considering UE is located
at S(x, y) in cell A, its received power from cell A could be
represented as Pra (Equation 1).
Pra = Pa P L a + G total (1)
Where Pa is the transmit power of cell A, P L a is path loss,
whereas Gtotal is the antenna gain. RSRP of total number of RSs
received per transmission time interval (TTI) can be calculated
using equation 2:
n
RS R Pa = (Pra )/n (2)
i=1
Where n is the total number of RSs received from cell A (serv-
ing cell). On the same lines equations 3 and 4 respectively gives
the received power and RSRP for the same user from target
(neighbor) cell B.
Pr b = Pb P L b + G total (3)
n
RS R Pb = (Pr b )/n (4)
i=1
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Fig. 1. RSRP and direction of mobility.
Fig. 2. Reduced early handover.
Where n is the total number of RSs received from cell B (neigh-
bour cell). Referring to Fig. 1, when UE reaches at intersection
line, then RSRP of both cells A and B becomes equal and
following holds true.
RS R Pa = RS R Pb (5)
However in order to result into reduced RLF, hysteresis value
along with offset is added to RS R Pa . Equation 6 must be satis-
fied to initiate A3 event and perform handover between current
and target cell. For standard handover, the value of hysteresis
ranges up to 30 dB [10].
RS R Pb RS R Pa + H y + O f f set (6)
Equation 6 holds true when UEs move away from cell A and
reaches near target cell B, where H y represents Hysteresis and
the O f f set is used to make current cells RSRP better than
actual measured.
RLF is one of the most important factors to be considered
in handover process. RLF can occur in early handover if the
signals received from candidate (target) cell are weak enough
to sustain the link. While if handover is triggered too late,
RLF could occur due to weak signal strength from serving cell.
Since our proposed hybrid scheme is aimed at energy conser-
vation, our work considered early handover. TTT and offset are
important factors to be considered in reduced RLF while per-
forming early handover. The chosen minimum value of offset
IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 20, NO. 1, JANUARY 2016
(i.e. 3 dB [10]) in this work is to ensure acceptable levels of
RLF. Compared to standard 3GPP handover, the phenomenon
of reduced early handover provides opportunity to turn Off idle
resources at early stage, resulting into increased energy sav-
ing. Referring to Fig. 2, UE represents user of a serving cell
(A) moving towards target cell (B). The time T taken by UE
to reach at the point where standard handover will take place is
given as (Equation 7):
T = S/V (7)
Where V is speed of UE, S is distance covered. While in our
proposed hybrid scheme, handover is initiated at early stage,
i.e. T duration (Fig. 2):
T = T T (8)
while T represents the time spent by UE to reach at early
stage of handover (H y ), and can be calculated as (Note: UE
velocity still remains the same as V):
T = S /V (9)
T is the hallmark of our proposed hybrid scheme and repre-
sents the number of TTI for which the freed resources of serving
cell A are switched off due to reduced early handover thereby
resulting into increased system level energy conservation.
In our hybrid scheme the Hysteresis is shrunk and its mini-
mum value is used to perform reduced early handover (H y ).
Considering equation (2), (4) & (6), UEs is to be reduced early
handed over to cell B, when equation (10) is satisfied.
n n  
(Pr b )n (Pra )n + H y + O f f set (10)
i=1 i=1
III. S YSTEM M ODEL
The system model comprises of a network design which con-
sists of core network, Evolved Packet Core (EPC), and Evolved
Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (E-UTRAN) based
on 3GPP specifications [11]. We consider seven cells scenario
with overlapping areas; while each cell has 10 randomly dis-
tributed UEs. UEs employ straight walking mobility model
(constant speed). Figs. 1 and 2 describe the mobility and phe-
nomenon of reduced early handover as implemented in our
proposed scheme. Main system level parameters are provided
in Table I below.
Total power consumption of overall system is calculated
using equation 11 [12].
Ptotal = Pdynamic + P_static (11)
where P_static is hardware based fixed power consumption.
Pdynamic can be further subdivided as follows (Equation 12)
Pdynamic = PT rans + PI dle (12)
PT rans is power consumed by resource blocks (RBs) during
transmission while PI dle is power consumed in idle state. Since
unused RBs are switched OFF in our proposed hybrid scheme,
therefore in reduced early handover PI dle will become zero.
KANWAL AND SAFDAR: REDUCED EARLY HANDOVER FOR ENERGY SAVING
TABLE I
S YSTEM PARAMETERS
Fig. 3. Relationship between hysteresis & UE speed.
IV. P ERFORMANCE A NALYSIS
Using system level parameters (Table I), the proposed
scheme is implemented in MATLAB. Our scheme is compared
with benchmark (3GPP LTE specifications) [11], and other state
of the art [9] in terms of key performance indicators such as
dynamic power consumption, energy consumption gain (ECG).
Importantly the proposed scheme is also investigated to see how
percentage of RLF reacts to the offset values.
A. UE Mobility and Hysteresis
Simulations were performed to investigate the relationship
between UE speed and the hysteresis value. It was found that
there exists an inverse relationship between UE speed and hys-
teresis. The value of hysteresis decreases with increased UE
speed and vice versa (Fig. 3). The relationship between UE
speed and hysteresis value also clearly satisfies the parameters
mentioned in Table I, i.e. UE speed of 40 km/hour related to
hysteresis value of 1 dB.
155
Fig. 4. Dynamic power consumption.
Fig. 5. Hybrid approach with benchmark & bandwidth expansion.
B. Dynamic Power Consumption
Fig. 4 compares the proposed ES scheme with the benchmark
in terms of average dynamic power consumption. Compared
to benchmark, our scheme employs reduced early handover
thereby turning off idle/unused RBs resulting in increased
energy conservation.
Proposed hybrid scheme is further evaluated at varying data
rates with the state of art [9] and benchmark [11]. Importantly,
hybrid nature of the proposed scheme, i.e. early handover
merged with bandwidth expansion on average provides 35%
saving in energy compared to benchmark [11], Figure 5.
C. Energy Consumption Gain (ECG)
Figure 6 presents Energy Consumption Gain. Clearly, the
system has achieved higher ECG when employing our hybrid
ES scheme compared to the other schemes. This definitely
impacts operational expenditures and help vendors stay
profitable.
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Fig. 6. Energy consumption gain.
Fig. 7. Relationship between RLF, offset and power consumption.
D. RLF, Power Consumption and Offset
Increased energy saving in our proposed scheme is achieved
by employing reduced early handover (which in turn is obtained
by limiting the hysteresis Figure 2). Figure 7 shows the
relationship between RLF, power consumption and the off-
set values. Clearly higher offset values result in reduced RLF,
however results in increased power consumption. However the
offset value has to be chosen carefully to impact energy sav-
ing. The offset value selected in our system modeling is 3 dB,
which gives a little higher value of RLF (around 5%) compared
to acceptable RLF values (i.e. 3% [10]). However this is a trade-
off to achieve increased energy saving as already demonstrated
in Figures 4 and 5 above.
IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 20, NO. 1, JANUARY 2016
V. C ONCLUSION
The significant increase in number of mobile users and their
increased data requirement has become challenge for vendors
to stay profitable. Due to increased operational expenditure
and global warming, energy saving has become a major chal-
lenge for future telecommunication systems. The eNodeBs are
the main energy hungry elements in LTE networks. This letter
presents a novel hybrid reduced early handover coupled with
bandwidth expansion for energy saving in LTE networks. The
early handover helps to achieve greater energy saving by turn-
ing off RBs completely rather than keeping them in idle mode.
At the cost of slightly increased RLF, the novel scheme was
found to provide around 35% energy saving while compared to
the benchmark and other state of the art.
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