Cooperative Handover Management in Dense Cellular Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cooperative handover management scheme for dense cellular networks that reduces handover rates and improves throughput by selectively skipping handovers and enabling BS cooperation, especially at high user mobility.

Contribution

It proposes a novel cooperative handover scheme combining handover skipping and BS cooperation, modeled with stochastic geometry, to enhance throughput in dense networks.

Findings

Achieves 12% to 27% throughput gains over traditional schemes.

Outperforms always best connected association at high mobility.

Quantifies the benefits of BS cooperation combined with handover skipping.

Abstract

Network densification has always been an important factor to cope with the ever increasing capacity demand. Deploying more base stations (BSs) improves the spatial frequency utilization, which increases the network capacity. However, such improvement comes at the expense of shrinking the BSs' footprints, which increases the handover (HO) rate and may diminish the foreseen capacity gains. In this paper, we propose a cooperative HO management scheme to mitigate the HO effect on throughput gains achieved via cellular network densification. The proposed HO scheme relies on skipping HO to the nearest BS at some instances along the user's trajectory while enabling cooperative BS service during HO execution at other instances. To this end, we develop a mathematical model, via stochastic geometry, to quantify the performance of the proposed HO scheme in terms of coverage probability and user throughput. The results show that the proposed cooperative HO scheme outperforms the always best connected based association at high mobility. Also, the value of BS cooperation along with handover skipping is quantified with respect to the HO skipping only that has recently appeared in the literature. Particularly, the proposed cooperative HO scheme shows throughput gains of 12% to 27% and 17% on average, when compared to the always best connected and HO skipping only schemes at user velocity ranging from 80 km/h to 160 Km/h, respectively.