  Hard handover mechanism is adopted to be used in 3GPP Long Term Evolution
(3GPP LTE) in order to reduce the complexity of the LTE network architecture.
This mechanism comes with degradation in system throughput as well as a higher
system delay. This paper proposes a new handover algorithm known as LTE Hard
Handover Algorithm with Average Received Signal Reference Power (RSRP)
Constraint (LHHAARC) in order to minimize number of handovers and the system
delay as well as maximize the system throughput. An optimized system
performance of the LHHAARC is evaluated and compared with three well-known
handover algorithms via computer simulation. The simulation results show that
the LHHAARC outperforms three well-known handover algorithms by having less
number of average handovers per UE per second, shorter total system delay
whilst maintaining a higher total system throughput.
