Processing handovers for mobile terminals capable of interference cancellation

Abstract

We disclose various embodiments of methods and apparatus for processing handovers of mobile terminals between base stations of a wireless communication system. An example handover algorithm used for this purpose enables the handover threshold to be increased for some mobile terminals, on a terminal-by-terminal basis, thereby individually expanding the range of the serving cell for each of such terminals. In an example embodiment, the handover-threshold determination is carried out based on physical-resource-block usage of the target cell. The extent of the cell-range expansion depends on whether or not the reference signals of the serving and target cells interfere with each other. Embodiments of the disclosed handover algorithm can advantageously reduce the number of failed handovers by allowing some communication sessions to run to completion before a handover is triggered.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.