A predictive handoff mechanism for 5G ultra dense networks

The fifth generation (5G) ultra dense network (UDN) is envisioned as a very dense deployment of low power base stations where heterogeneous radio access technologies are used to satisfy the data rate demand of users employing both licensed and unlicensed spectrum. In UDN scenario, conditions of the channels operating in licensed band may exhibit intermittent characteristics due to the varying level of interference received from large number of nearby access networks. On the other hand, channel conditions in unlicensed band may fluctuate drastically due to the interference caused by the co-existence of long term evolution (LTE-U) and wireless local area network (WLAN) in unlicensed band. The traditional handover mechanisms rely on the instantaneous assessments of link qualities such as RSS and SINR. The target network selected based on such instantaneous values may not be the appropriate one when the actual handover is executed. In this work, we have proposed a predictive handover mechanism which can estimate achievable throughput values from different candidate access networks after handoff execution. Simulation results confirm that our proposed predictive handover mechanism significantly outperforms an existing reference base station efficiency based approach.