Title
Managing Vertical Handovers in Millimeter Wave Heterogeneous Networks
Abstract
A promising solution to address the spectrum shortage in 5G cellular systems is the deployment of millimeter wave (mmWave) heterogeneous networks (HetNets). However, a key challenge for mmWave HetNets is to manage the user mobility and handovers among mmWave small cells exploiting highly directional antennas and conventional microwave macro cells. In this paper, we propose a new efficient handover decision algorithm based on a Markov Decision Process (MDP) to optimize the overall service experience of users in mmWave HetNets. By utilizing user’s mobility information (velocity and location), the proposed algorithm avoids excessive handovers and effectively tackles beamforming misalignments, and signal blockages in mmWave small cells. To improve the computational efficiency of the MDP, we apply the action elimination method by exploiting unique handover properties of mmWave HetNets. While maintaining optimality, theoretical analysis shows that our proposed handover decision algorithm can reduce the computational complexity by <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$0.25M|\mathcal {B}_{s}|+0.25M/(M-1)$ </tex-math></inline-formula> times, where <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$M$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is the number of base stations and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$|\mathcal {B}_{s}|$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is the number of beamwidth options for mmWave beamforming. Mobility-trace driven numerical results demonstrate the optimality of our proposed algorithm compared with other benchmark schemes and its low computational complexity over the traditional approach.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/TCOMM.2018.2877326
IEEE Transactions on Communications
Keywords
Field
DocType
Handover,Array signal processing,Base stations,Throughput,Microwave communication
Beamforming,Base station,Computer science,Markov decision process,Electronic engineering,Directional antenna,Heterogeneous network,Throughput,Handover,Computational complexity theory,Distributed computing
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
67
2
0090-6778
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.41
0
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Shizhe Zang151.44
Wei Bao210011.71
Phee Lep Yeoh3306.15
Branka Vucetic43266352.78
Yonghui Li53393253.70