Time-based Handover Skipping in Cellular Networks: Spatially Stochastic Modeling and Analysis

Abstract: Handover (HO) management has attracted attention of research in the context of wireless cellular communication networks. One crucial problem of HO management is to deal with increasing HOs experienced by a mobile user. To address this problem, HO skipping techniques have been studied in recent years. In this paper, we propose a novel HO skipping scheme, namely, time-based HO skipping. In the proposed scheme, HOs of a user are controlled by a certain fixed period of time, which we call skipping time. The skipping time can be managed as a system parameter, thereby enabling flexible operation of HO skipping. We analyze the transmission performance of the proposed scheme on the basis of a stochastic geometry approach. In the scenario where a user performs the time-based HO skipping, we derive the analytical expressions for two performance metrics: the HO rate and the expected data rate. The analysis results demonstrate that the scenario with the time-based HO skipping outperforms the scenario without HO skipping particularly when the user moves fast. Furthermore, we reveal that there is a unique optimal skipping time maximizing the transmission performance, which we obtain approximately.