An Efficient D2D Handover Management Scheme for SDN-based 5G networks

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is one of the revolutionary technologies in 5G cellular networks that enables mobile devices to communicate directly without the Base Station (BS) involvement. One of its major objectives is to provide seamless mobility satisfying QoS requirements that are not supported in LTE-A cellular network. Hence, 5G networks have to go through architecture processes rather than a series of technology updates. For that, we propose a new Software Defined Networking (SDN) based architecture able to manage D2D communications. In this paper, we introduce a new D2D handover management scheme to solve the D2D mobility issue. The proposed mechanism can enhance the handover performances, compared to the handover management in conventional LTE networks as well as increase the D2D service continuity.