Enhancing Blockage Detection and Handover on 60 GHz Networks with P4 Programmable Data Planes

Millimeter-Wave (mmWave) technology for 5G net-works is promising due to its capability of supporting high data rates and low-latency communications. Despite such benefits, its narrow beams make it highly susceptible to blockages. To overcome blockages, solutions rely on handover connections from the current (blocked) access point to an alternative (non-blocked) access point. With state-of-the-art techniques, handover decisions may take hundreds of milliseconds to a few seconds at best, thus disrupting connections, dropping packets, and substantially reducing throughput. This paper proposes a P4 Programmable Data Plane (PDP) assisted system that reduces the handover time between access points when a blockage occurs. The proposed scheme relies on the capability of a PDP to track flows in real-time and measure network metrics with nanosecond resolution. The PDP computes the packet Inter-Arrival Time (IAT) for each flow that is routed through a mm Wave access point. As a blockage occurs, the scheme is able to detect sudden increases in the packet IAT and handover flows to a non-blocked access point. Evaluation results show that the proposed approach can detect blockages faster than current solutions, thus mitigating the corresponding throughput degradation and packet losses. On average, the proposed approach can detect blockages in 20 milliseconds.