This paper deals with the problem of triggering handoff procedure at an appropriate point of time to reduce the ping-pong effect problem in the long-term evolution advanced (LTE-A) network. In the meantime, we also have studied a dynamic handoff threshold scheme, named adaptive measurement report period and handoff threshold (AMPHT), based on the user equipment’s (UE’s) reference signal received quality (RSRQ) variation and the moving velocity of UE. AMPHT reduces the probability of unnecessarily premature handoff decision making and also avoids the problem of handoff failure due to too late handoff decision making when the moving velocity of UE is high. AMPHT is achieved by two critical parameters: (1) a dynamic RSRQ threshold for handoff making; (2) a dynamic interval of time for the UE’s RSRQ reporting. The performance of AMPHT is validated by comparing numerical experiments (MATLAB tool) with simulation results (the ns-3 LENA module). Our experiments show that AMPHT reduces the premature handoff probability by 34% at most in a low moving velocity and reduces the handoff failure probability by 25% in a high moving velocity. Additionally, AMPHT can reduce a large number of unnecessary handoff overheads and can be easily implemented because it uses the original control messages of 3GPP E-UTRA.

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