On the Reduction of Unnecessary Handovers Using 5G Small Cells in a 5G NR Environment

Nowadays, the deployment of 5G Non-StandAlone (NSA) networks has led to significant enhancements in the User Equipment (UE) experience, in particular in terms of latency reduction and throughput increase. To this end, 5G gNodeBs (gNBs) offer broad coverage but may face challenges in areas with low signal strength, resulting in a Quality of Service (QoS) degradation and too short connections to distant gNBs (denoted as Unnecessary HandOvers, UHOs) due to geographic peculiarities. In order to tackle these issues, in this paper the use of cost-effective 5G small cells in critical areas is considered, aiming at (i) boosting coverage, (ii) enhancing UE QoS, and (iii) avoiding UHOs, thus improving HO performance and UE QoS.