A survey on various handover technologies in 5G network using the modular handover modules

Purpose Fifth-generation (5G) networks play a significant role in handover methods. 5G wireless network is open, flexible and highly heterogeneous along with the overlay coverage and small cell deployments. Handover management is one of the main problems in the heterogeneous network. Also, handover satisfies the needs of ultra-reliable communications along with very high reliability and availability in 5G networks. Handover management deals with every active connection of a user’s device, which moves the connection between the user’s device and the counterparty from one network point to another. Thus, the handover decision determines the best access network and also decides whether the handover is performed or not. Design/methodology/approach The main intention of this survey is to review several existing handover technologies in 5G. Using the categories of analysis, the existing techniques are divided into different techniques such as authentication-based techniques, blockchain-based techniques, software-defined-based techniques and radio access-based techniques. The survey is made by considering the methods such as used software, categorization of methods and used in the research works. Furthermore, the handover rate is considered for performance evaluation for the handover techniques in 5G. The drawbacks present in the existing review papers are elaborated in research gaps and issues division. Findings Through the detailed analysis and discussion, it can be summarized that the widely concerned evaluation metric for the performance evaluation is the handover rate. It is exploited that the handover rate within the range of 91%–99% is achieved by three research papers. Originality/value A survey on the various handover mechanisms in 5G networks is expected in this study. The research papers used in this survey are gathered from different sources such as Google Scholar and IEEE. Also, this survey suggests a further extension for the handover mechanism in 5G networks by considering various research gaps and issues.

A Semantic and Knowledge-Based Approach for Handover Management

Handover Management (HM) is pivotal for providing service continuity, enormous reliability and extreme-low latency, and meeting sky-high data rates, in wireless communications. Current HM approaches based on a single criterion may lead to unnecessary and frequent handovers due to a partial network view that is constrained to information about link quality. In turn, HM approaches based on multicriteria may present a failure of handovers and wrong network selection, decreasing the throughput and increasing the packet loss in the network. This paper proposes SIM-Know, an approach for improving HM. SIM-Know improves HM by including a Semantic Information Model (SIM) that enables context-aware and multicriteria handover decisions. SIM-Know also introduces a SIM-based distributed Knowledge Base Profile (KBP) that provides local and global intelligence to make contextual and proactive handover decisions. We evaluated SIM-Know in an emulated wireless network. When the end-user device moves at low and moderate speeds, the results show that our approach outperforms the Signal Strong First (SSF, single criterion approach) and behaves similarly to the Analytic Hierarchy Process combined with the Technique for Order Preferences by Similarity to the Ideal Solution (AHP-TOPSIS, multicriteria approach) regarding the number of handovers and the number of throughput drops. SSF outperforms SIM-Know and AHP-TOPSIS regarding the handover latency metric because SSF runs a straightforward process for making handover decisions. At high speeds, SIM-Know outperforms SSF and AHP-TOPSIS regarding the number of handovers and the number of throughput drops and, further, improves the throughput, delay, jitter, and packet loss in the network. Considering the obtained results, we conclude that SIM-Know is a practical and attractive solution for cognitive HM.

A Hybrid User Mobility Prediction Approach for Handover Management in Mobile Networks

Mobile networks are expected to face major problems such as low network capacity, high latency, and limited resources but are expected to provide seamless connectivity in the foreseeable future. It is crucial to deliver an adequate level of performance for network services and to ensure an acceptable quality of services for mobile users. Intelligent mobility management is a promising solution to deal with the aforementioned issues. In this context, modeling user mobility behaviour is of great importance in order to extract valuable information about user behaviours and to meet their demands. In this paper, we propose a hybrid user mobility prediction approach for handover management in mobile networks. First, we extract user mobility patterns using a mobility model based on statistical models and deep learning algorithms. We deploy a vector autoregression (VAR) model and a gated recurrent unit (GRU) to predict the future trajectory of a user. We then reduce the number of unnecessary handover signaling messages and optimize the handover procedure using the obtained prediction results. We deploy mobility data generated from real users to conduct our experiments. The simulation results show that the proposed VAR-GRU mobility model has the lowest prediction error in comparison with existing methods. Moreover, we investigate the handover processing and transmission costs for predictive and non-predictive scenarios. It is shown that the handover-related costs effectively decrease when we obtain a prediction in the network. For vertical handover, processing cost and transmission cost improve, respectively, by 57.14% and 28.01%.