Handover Management in 5G and Beyond: A Topology Aware Skipping Approach

Network densification is found to be a potential solution to meet 5G capacity standards. Network densification offers more capacity by shrinking base stations' (BSs) footprints, thus reduces the number of users served by each BS. However, the gains in the capacity are achieved at the expense of increased handover (HO) rates. Hence, HO rate is a key performance limiting factor that should be carefully considered in densification planning. This paper sheds light on the HO problem that appears in dense 5G networks and proposes an effective solution via topology aware HO skipping. Different skipping techniques are considered and compared with the conventional best connected scheme. To this end, the effectiveness of the proposed schemes is validated by studying the average user rate in the downlink single-tier and two-tier cellular networks, which are modeled using Poisson point process and Poisson cluster process, respectively. The proposed skipping schemes show up to 47% gains in the average throughput that would maximize the benefit of network densification.