Managing Vertical Handovers in Millimeter Wave Heterogeneous Networks

A promising solution to address the spectrum shortage in 5G cellular systems is the deployment of millimeter wave (mmWave) heterogeneous networks (HetNets). However, a key challenge for mmWave HetNets is to manage the user mobility and handovers among mmWave small cells exploiting highly directional antennas and conventional microwave macro cells. In this paper, we propose a new efficient handover decision algorithm based on a Markov Decision Process (MDP) to optimize the overall service experience of users in mmWave HetNets. By utilizing user's mobility information (velocity and location), the proposed algorithm avoids excessive handovers and effectively tackles beamforming misalignments, and signal blockages in mmWave small cells. To improve the computational efficiency of the MDP, we apply the action elimination method by exploiting unique handover properties of mmWave HetNets. While maintaining optimality, theoretical analysis shows that our proposed handover decision algorithm can reduce the computational complexity by 0.25M|B
_s
| + 0.25M/(M - 1) times, where M is the number of base stations and |B
_s
| is the number of beamwidth options for mmWave beamforming. Mobility-trace driven numerical results demonstrate the optimality of our proposed algorithm compared with other benchmark schemes and its low computational complexity over the traditional approach.