Handover Management in 5G and Beyond: A Topology Aware Skipping Approach

Network densification is foreseen as a potential solution to fulfill the 5G spectral efficiency requirements. The spectral efficiency is improved by shrinking base stations' (BSs) footprints, thus improving the spatial frequency reuse and reducing the number of users sharing the resources of each BS. However, the foreseen densification gains are achieved at the expense of increasing handover (HO) rates. Hence, HO rate is a key performance limiting factor that should be carefully considered in densification planning. This paper sheds light on the HO problem that appears in dense 5G networks and proposes an effective solution via topology aware HO skipping. Different skipping techniques are considered and compared with the conventional best connected scheme. To this end, the proposed schemes are validated via the average user rate in downlink single-tier and two-tier cellular networks, which are modeled using the Poisson point process and the Poisson cluster process, respectively. The proposed skipping schemes show up to 47% gains in the average throughput, which would maximize the benefit of network densification.