With the great increase of connected devices and new types of applications, mobile networks are witnessing exponential growth of traffic volume. To meet emerging requirements, it is widely agreed that the fifth-generation mobile network will be ultradense and heterogeneous. However, the deployment of a high number of small cells in such networks poses challenges for the mobility management, including frequent, undesired, and ping-pong handovers, not to mention issues related to increased delay and failure of the handover process.The adoption of software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) technologies into 5G networks offers a new way to address the above-mentioned challenges. These technologies offer tools and mechanisms to make networks flexible, programmable, and more manageable. The SDN has global network control ability so that various functions such as the handover control can be implemented in the SDN architecture to manage the handover efficiently. In this article, we propose a Software-Defined Handover (SDHO) solution to optimize the handover in future 5G networks. In particular, we design a Software-Defined Handover Management Engine (SDHME) to handle the handover control mechanism in 5G ultradense networks. The SDHME is defined in the application plane of the SDN architecture, executed by the control plane to orchestrate the data plane. Simulation results demonstrate that, compared with the conventional LTE handover strategy, the proposed approach significantly reduces the handover failure ratio and handover delay. KEYWORDS 5G ultradense networks, fast handover, network function virtualization, software-defined networking, virtual cell Int J Commun Syst. 2019;32:e3831. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/dac FIGURE 1 Topology of ultradense network (UDN) toward 5G. SDN, software-defined networkingexperience. The topology of UDN toward 5G is illustrated in Figure 1. In UDN, a high number of point of attachment (PoA) are distributed randomly without network planning. 3 The next-generation network is characterized by heterogeneous networks having different coverage ranges such as picocell, femtocell, attocell, and multiple radio access technologies (RATs) such as 4G, 5G, and WLAN. In this way, a greater number of simultaneous device connections are enabled by the ultradense heterogeneous small cells.Although UDN helps to solve coverage, capacity, spectrum efficiency, and data rates problems on the access side, it issues many challenges to the mobility management such as handover problems faced by mobile users and poor performance like long handover delay, failures, and increased signaling overhead. This causes disconnection and quality of service (QoS) degradation. Accordingly, ultradense 5G mobile networks require innovations in the management of the network and necessitate a novel and accurate handover management mechanism to deal with these challenges. Recently, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) organization has focused on software-defined networking (SDN) and netwo...
Mobility management has always been a challenging and important issue for the next-generation all-IP mobile networks. Seamless mobility is one of the requirements to provide real-time services in such networks. Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) has been developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a network-based mobility management protocol to support the mobility of IP devices. Although several designs have been presented in the literature to reduce the amount of PMIPv6 signalling and latency handover, they do not satisfy the real-time application requirements. In this study, the authors first propose a novel vertical handover algorithm that helps to anticipate the handover process in an efficient manner. The suggested approach is based on PMIPv6 and IEEE 802.21 Media Independent Handover (MIH) standard. The authors also added a new MIH primitive in order to indicate that a handover is needed to be done very soon. The triggering of such process is done thanks to two proposed dynamic thresholds. According to the analytical evaluation and simulation results, the proposed method guarantees a significant reduction of the handover delay and the signalling overhead, handover blocking probability and packet loss.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.