Simulating LTE mobility management in presence of coverage holes with ns-3

In this paper, we present our approach to simulate mobility management scenarios for LTE heterogeneous network deployments defined by challenging radio propagation scenarios, such as the presence of coverage holes. We focus on the LTE module of ns-3, which is also known as LENA. Our contribution is twofold. On one hand, we propose a set of new features for the LTE module, including a new model for simulating obstacles blocking the propagation of radio signals, and a handover model suitable for the offline evaluation of mobility management solutions. On the other hand, we describe in detail the setup of the simulation scenario, highlighting the challenges that we faced during the implementation and discussing the chosen configuration parameters. Finally, we present some simulation results that we obtained with the proposed approach.