An Inter/Intra Slice Handover Scheme for Mobility Management in 5G Network

5G Network Slicing and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) are two strategies that contribute in 5G accelerated deployment. As a result of using a variety of radio access technologies, mobility management in 5G deployments becomes a big challenge which needs more attention especially for high QoS request requirements. Network slicing, in combination with MEC, are crucial enablers for on-demand service models. This paper focuses on mobile roaming users’ access to radio resources across heterogeneous networks. The network slicing concept is used to present a unified service architecture that allows smooth handover between 5G and 4G networks and maintaining the user’s requests without QoS hindrance. In this paper we proposed a handover mobility management architecture using network slicing evolution on the mobile edge network to offload the core network from the control signaling overhead for the inter-slice handover level, along with a smart hybrid handover skipping schema based on the mobile user current location and target cell size for the intra-slice handover level. And we evaluate the proposed architecture against the traditional RSS based handover and CMaaS architecture. A significant reduction in the handover delay and an improvement in the average throughput was accomplished over the traditional RSS based and CMaaS handover architecture.