Route-Aware Handover Enhancement for Drones in Cellular Networks

The support of unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones, in cellular networks has become very important to enable a wide range of new applications for the next generation wireless systems. However, the cellular networks have been traditionally designed to serve terrestrial users, and thus are encountering many challenges to support drone wireless communication. Particularly, drones experience increased interference and channel fluctuation and consequently suffer more frequent handover, higher handover failure rate and ping-pong rate while in motion. In this paper, we propose enhanced mobility management for drones by exploiting their pre-configured flight path information. Our route-aware handover algorithm will instruct the base station to trigger the handover procedure to minimize handover failure and reduce unnecessary handover. We further provide a practical implementation where the network can make online decisions under realistic modeling assumptions. Based on 3GPP-compliant handover evaluation methodology, we demonstrate that our algorithm can effectively reduce the number of handover and handover failure by upto 32x and 24x, respectively, compared to the existing approach. This significantly reduces handover signalling overhead and service interruption time. The simulation results also show that our algorithm can completely eliminate ping-pong effect in certain cases.