Cell selection scheme for handover reduction based on moving direction and velocity of UEs for 5G multi-layered radio access networks

We propose a cell selection scheme based on the moving direction and velocity of a user that reduces the number of handovers resulting from the 5G multi-layered Radio Access Network (RAN) architecture. In 5G multi-layered RANs, features of each cell such as the frequency band, system bandwidth, communication range, and installation density are different according to the cell type and these cells are mixed and overlaid. In this environment, the number of handovers is expected to be increased due to the differences in characteristics of each cell. The existing criteria for cell selection schemes such as that based on power detection or signal quality do not limit the increase in the number of handovers resulting from the 5G multi-layered RAN architecture. Therefore, we propose a cell selection scheme that takes into consideration the direction of movement of the sets of user equipment (UE) and the location of candidate cells for connection. Moreover, the proposed scheme considers the velocity of the UE and the type of cell for connection. This achieves a reduction in the number of handovers and mitigates the degradation in communications quality resulting from a tradeoff from the reduction in the number of handovers. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is evaluated in a metropolitan environment that simulates the actual location of Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan based on computer simulations. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme requires 30% fewer handovers without any degradation in the average end-to-end transmission time compared to the conventional power detection based scheme.