Efficient Mobility Support Services for Highly Mobile Devices in 5G Networks

Cellular networks have to provide continuous network connectivity services to mobile devices. 5G networks are expected to support a huge number of highly mobile devices, roaming seamlessly across very small cells. Consequently, the handover rate for these extremely dense networks is expected to be very high. To reduce the burden caused by rapid handover requests, this study suggests a scalable cellular mobility management scheme, aiming to support a massive number of highly mobile devices in 5G and beyond networks. This goal is achieved by partitioning the mobile devices into proximity-based clusters established hierarchically and using the concept of nomadic cells. Previous distributed mobility management schemes are not sufficiently efficient to support the rate of handover requests expected for 5G networks. Due to their high computational complexity, previous group-based methods are not applicable for real-time services. In contrast to these schemes, the proposed scheme is scalable with the number of devices.