Handover System and Method for 4G/5G Networks

An innovative handover signaling method, that utilizes the Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm, parallel information transfer and elimination of duplicate information to reduce the signaling overhead during the handover preparation and rejection phases, which are critical for an efficient handover. 5G networks will be extremely dense and heterogeneous, not just in terms of number of users and the variety of applications that will be accessed by them, but also in terms of the number and type of access points that will be present to serve the users. During mobility, the present handover methods will be rendered inefficient since the time available to perform the preparation, execution and completion phase for handover is much shorter than in 4G. Further, the 5G requirements as specified by 3GPP and ITU specify that the end-to-end latency for certain services should be below 1 ms. Henceforth, the handover signaling involved during the preparation and rejection phase will be extremely critical, so as to ensure that the desired “next” access point is not missed due to delays created through the signaling process. Thus, designing low-latency and bandwidth efficient handover preparation and rejection phase signaling while ensuring 5G QoS is being met will be a challenge. We introduce a novel SDN based and parallelized handover signaling methodology. The methodology utilizes the fact that current day networks perform multiple handshakes to prepare/reject for an impending handover/handover cancel phase. Thus, in our method we use the SDN paradigm to ensure that the unnecessary handshakes are removed and the Mobility Management entity (MME for 4G and SMF for 5G), interacting with SDN controller, is responsible for sharing the control information with the other core network entities. Such a reduction is obtained through parallelization (facilitated by the SDN) and reordering Information Elements (IEs).