Network Slicing Mobility Aware Control to Assist Handover Decisions on e-Health 5G Use Cases

In the context of the 5G e-health vertical, Network Slicing (NS) promotes mobile e-health (m-health) applications with high innovative facilities through a set of network resource components that can be extended through physical resource virtualization strategies and softwarization. The Cloud-Network Slicing (CNS) approach was recently introduced to offer services across multiple administrative and technological domains distributed across the federated cloud and network infrastructures. The CNS approach can improve m-health user's experience by allowing high content and service delivery flexibility through Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) capabilities within the Radio Access Networks (RAN) closer to the healthcare data source. In this scenario, characterized by the inevitability of handover between the various cells existing in the RAN, the infrastructure management system must be extended with improved capabilities to enable handover decisions to maintain the m-health UE experience during mobility events. This paper introduces a network-slicing mobility-aware control approach for paving 5G CNS-enabled systems with automated and proactive mobility control and management capabilities. Simulation results revealed that our proposal could provide m-health applications with service-level slicing-driven handover procedures while keeping connectivity constraints.