Low-Overhead Handover-Skipping Technique for 5G Networks

Network densification has been one of the principal causes of performance gain in cellular networks, and 5G networks will not be any different. As cell sizes shrink, handovers become more frequent incurring extra delays that bury all the prospective gains. Mobility in multi-tier dense cellular networks calls for a change in the way it has been traditionally handled in an always-on world, where users take universal data access for granted. Invisible to them, mobile network operators need to provision backhauling to include advanced interference mitigation techniques. In this paper, we propose a spectrum database-aided handover management technique that aims to mitigate the number of disconnections without overloading the backhaul unnecessarily. The proposed technique exploits a spectrum database that stores reception information along with geolocation data, commercially available on any handheld device. Moreover, we have benchmarked several state-of-the-art handover schemes for 5G networks against ours in a realistic urban environment with user mobility trace data. The results highlight that our method can deliver the same downstream traffic with 33% decrease in disconnections when compared to the conventional approach. At the same time, backhaul traffic is reduced up to 68% against our counterparts.