Enhanced automatic neighbor relation function for 5G cellular systems with massive MIMO

The technique of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) in 5G cellular systems could greatly increase the cell coverage size and boost the signal-to-noise power ratio (SNR) for cell-edge UE. However, the suitable beam acquisition for the target cell during handover procedure would greatly increase handover latency and cause service interruption. This paper proposes an enhanced automatic neighbor relation (eANR) function to tackle with such issue in a self-optimization network (SON)-type approach. In eANR function, the beam pairing relation of source cell and target cell are real-time created and dynamically updated in the neighbor cell relation (NCR) table. With these information, the target beam could be acquired by simply looking up beam-specific (BS) NCR table with the source beam as index. In this way, the effort of field measurement on target beams and target cells upon handover are alleviated or avoided. Simulation results demonstrate that the performance on correlation coefficient between the acquired target beam by the proposed eANR function and that by field measurement has around 10% gap in 28GHz and 72GHz line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) millimeter wave channels.