An Enhanced System Information Acquisition Scheme for CSG Femtocells in 3GPP LTE/LTE A Systems

System information (SI) acquisition is a mandatory component for inbound handover (HO) to closed subscriber group femtocells in LTE/LTE-Advanced networks. In this paper, we analyze theoretically and numerically several existing SI acquisition schemes such as scheduled, semi scheduled and autonomous SI acquisition scheme. We found that using those schemes can result in long measurement gaps; which may lead to degradation to the service quality of user or may cause radio link failure. Furthermore, we propose an enhanced SI acquisition scheme to minimize the latency of the SI acquisition gap and to reduce the inbound HO evaluation phase. Our results show that the proposed scheme has a better performance than the existing SI acquisition schemes by approximately 70%.