Partially Blind Handovers for mmWave New Radio Aided by Sub-6 GHz LTE Signaling

Abstract: For a base station that supports cellular communications in sub-6 GHz LTE and millimeter (mmWave) bands, we propose a supervised machine learning algorithm to improve the success rate in the handover between the two radio frequencies using sub-6 GHz and mmWave prior channel measurements within a temporal window. The main contributions of our paper are to 1) introduce partially blind handovers, 2) employ machine learning to perform handover success predictions from sub-6 GHz to mmWave frequencies, and 3) show that this machine learning based algorithm combined with partially blind handovers can improve the handover success rate in a realistic network setup of colocated cells. Simulation results show improvement in handover success rates for our proposed algorithm compared to standard handover algorithms.