A Request-Based Handover Strategy Using NDN for 5G

With the developing of 5G, it is widely accepted that 5G will use a system architecture that supports the ultradense networks (UDN) deployments. In this architecture, a user will be covered by a large amount of small cell base stations (SBS) in 5G. However, selecting an SBS for handover is a great challenge. To address the challenge, the emerging content-oriented Named Data Networking (NDN) has attractive advantages, such as providing name-based routing. In this paper, a request-based handover strategy (RBHS) is presented to improve the user experience in performance and obtain the optimal allocation of resources, and a caching mechanism based on the users’ requests is introduced for it. The proposed caching mechanism and access network selection mechanism were validated utilizing ndnSIM. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed strategy achieves around 30% higher cache hit rate and 20% more traffic reduction, compared with the access network selection based on SINR.