Dual Connectivity-Aided Proactive Handover and Resource Reservation for Mobile Users

Dual connectivity has been regarded as an effective mechanism for mobility management to reduce the handover latency and improve transmission reliability. In this article, we investigate a dual connectivity-aided proactive mobility management scheme for mobile users requesting realtime service with minimum data rate requirements. The proactive mobility management consists of a predictive resource reservation scheme and a proactive handover scheme. The predictive resource reservation scheme is optimized to improve the network throughput or user fairness with the predicted average channel gains and the predicted set of connected base stations for each user. The proactive handover scheme aims to avoid frequent and delayed handovers, and reduce the computational complexity by partitioning cell-center and cell-edge users and choosing different numbers of connected base stations for the two types of users. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms reactive counterparts, which can effectively reduce service outages meanwhile support higher network throughput when the traffic load is heavy, or improve user fairness meanwhile cause less service outages when the traffic load is light.