Beyond 5G: Reducing the Handover Rate for High Mobility Communications

The fifth-generation (5G) and beyond cellular networks are expected to support a huge number of mobile devices, roaming seamlessly across very small cells. Consequently, the handover rate for these extremely dense networks is expected to be very high. To reduce the burden caused by rapid handover requests, and to support a massive number of highly mobile devices in 5G and beyond networks, this study suggests using proximity-based clusters as nomadic cells integrated with Aerial Access Networks (AANs). These nomadic cells are formed by two-levels hierarchical partitioning of the mobile devices into proximity-based clusters. Previous distributed mobility management schemes are not sufficiently efficient to support the handover rate expected for 5G and beyond networks. Due to their high computational complexity, previous group-based methods are not applicable for real-time services. In contrast to these schemes, the proposed scheme is scalable with the number of devices. Moreover, the creation of a mobility group raises practical as well as security and privacy issues that were overlooked by previous schemes. These issues are addressed in this study.