Intelligent Seamless Handover in Next-Generation Networks

Providing high quality of service (QoS) to mobile end-users, and guaranteeing resilient connectivity for healthcare wearables and other mobile devices is a critical component of Industry 5.0. However, one of the biggest difficulties that network operators encounter is the issue of mobility handover, as it can be detrimental to end-users’ safety and experience. Although various handover mechanisms have been developed to meet high QoS, achieving optimum handover performance while maintaining sustainable network operation is still an unreached goal. In this paper, random linear codes (RLC) are used to achieve seamless handover, where handover traffic is encoded using RLC and then multicasted to handover destination(s) using a mobility prediction algorithm for destination selection. To overcome the limitations of current IP core networks, we make use of a revolutionary IP-over-Information-Centric Network architecture at the network core that supports highly flexible multicast switching. The combination of the RLC, flexible multicast, and mobility prediction, makes the communication resilient to packet loss and helps to avoid handover failures of existing solutions while reducing overall packet delivery cost, hence offering sustainable mobility support. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated using a realistic vehicular mobility dataset and cellular network infrastructure and compared with Fast Handover for Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PFMIPv6). The results show that our scheme efficiently supports seamless session continuity in high mobility environments, reducing the total traffic delivery cost by 44% compared to its counterpart PFMIPv6, while reducing handover delay by 26% and handover failure to less than 2% of total handovers.