Handover Management for mmWave Networks With Proactive Performance Prediction Using Camera Images and Deep Reinforcement Learning

For millimeter-wave networks, this paper presents a paradigm shift for leveraging time-consecutive camera images in handover decision problems. While making handover decisions, it is important to predict future long-term performance—e.g., the cumulative sum of time-varying data rates—proactively to avoid making myopic decisions. However, this study experimentally notices that a time-variation in the received powers is not necessarily informative for proactively predicting the rapid degradation of data rates caused by moving obstacles. To overcome this challenge, this study proposes a proactive framework wherein handover timings are optimized while obstacle-caused data rate degradations are predicted before the degradations occur. The key idea is to expand a state space to involve time-consecutive camera images, which comprises informative features for predicting such data rate degradations. To overcome the difficulty in handling the large dimensionality of the expanded state space, we use a deep reinforcement learning for deciding the handover timings. The evaluations performed based on the experimentally obtained camera images and received powers demonstrate that the expanded state space facilitates (i) the prediction of obstacle-caused data rate degradations from 500 ms before the degradations occur and (ii) superior performance to a handover framework without the state space expansion.