Energy efficient handovers and performance analysis in macro-femto cells with radio resource constraints

Energy efficiency is considered to be a key performance metric in the next generation wireless communication systems. In this paper we consider energy efficient handovers between macro and femto base stations with transmit power control. The handovers are made considering the constraints in the available radio resources at the femto base stations which play an important role in limiting the energy efficiency performance gain of such systems. The handover algorithm is presented and was simulated for a single macro-cell scenario with multiple femto-cells and under shadow fading conditions. Our results show some considerable improvement in the total energy efficiency of the access network and a slight variation in the distribution of excess energy when different user spatial-density models are considered