Intelligent User-Centric Handover Scheme in Ultra-Dense Cellular Networks

Handover and mobility management are important and critical aspects of future ultra-dense cellular networks. This paper proposes an intelligent handover technique, which reduces the handover rate without significant performance losses. Specifically, we investigate a user-centric handover scheme that exploits base station (BS) cooperation to enable a dynamic handover skipping. By considering mobility awareness, the users skip some handover executions and remain connected with at least a single BS. In this way, we achieve a balance between BS cooperative transmissions and single BS transmission to reduce handover rate and consequently the associated signal overhead. Our results show that the proposed scheme outperforms conventional solutions in terms of the average user throughput, particularly for high velocities and ultra-dense networks.