Effectiveness of Handover Control Parameters on Handover Performance in 5G and beyond Mobile Networks

Abstract

Mobility management is essential in mobile communication networks to provide a smooth connection during users’ mobility. Handover control parameters (HCPs), such as handover margin (HOM) and time-to-trigger (TTT), are major and essential factors in mobility management that must be defined carefully to make efficient handover (HO) procedures. Their impact becomes more critical with the deployment of fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks and beyond (B5G). This is due to the different characterizations of next mobile networks, such as the use of millimeter-wave (mmWave) bands, the ultradense deployment of small base stations (BSs), large mobile connection traffic growth, and other more critical factors. The case becomes more sensitive with the high mobility speed scenarios. This study proposes different HCP system settings to be investigated and analyzed over B5G networks. They will be investigated with various mobile speed scenarios to illustrate their impact on the network performance. Various key performance indicators (KPIs) are considered to evaluate and validate system performance, such as reference signal received power (RSRP), HO probability (HOP), HO ping-pong (HOPP), radio link failure (RLF), HO interruption time (HIT), and HO failure (HOF). Results show that the various system settings provide different and significant impacts on the performance of B5G networks. Furthermore, the setting of HCP1 obtained the best performance in RSRP and RLF with -69.7 dBm and 4.8%, respectively, while the optimum performance of HOPP, HIT, HOP, and HOF is achieved in the HCP6 setting with 0%, 0.02 ms, 0.05%, and 0%, respectively. Moreover, the overall outcome of all HCP settings is 54.94%. These results indicate a tradeoff between RLF and HOPP with various HCP settings in B5G mobile networks. Thus, the HCP system settings must be adjusted carefully considering other factors, such as mobile environment and use case.