An Intelligent Energy-Efficient Handover Scheme Based on CoMP for Heterogeneous Network

With the exponential growth of user equipment (UE) access in future networks, service operators are deploying many low-cost and low-power heterogeneous base stations. However, when considering cooperative multi-point (CoMP) based soft handover schemes, there will be a trade-off between user quality of service (QoS), system power consumption, and handover frequency. Therefore, in this letter, we proposed a CoMP-based energy-efficient intelligent handover algorithm, named CEH-PPO in heterogeneous cellular networks. The proposed scheme is based on the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm in deep reinforcement learning. The optimization objective is to maximize the average user rates and minimize energy consumption and handover frequency in the CoMP-based heterogeneous network. Thus, we can dynamically select the transmission base station set for UEs to accomplish the handover procedure. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed CEH-PPO algorithm simultaneously improves the average QoS of UEs in the system and reduces the overall handover frequency while reducing the overall power consumption.