Media Independent Mobility Management for D2D Communications over Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets)

The rapid growth of traffic demand and innovation of mobile networks have pushed the current communication infrastructure to provide a tight integration of different wireless technologies. On the one hand, all user connections are expected to be heterogeneous in future networks and thus an intelligent mobility management is essential to satisfy the requirements of lower latency, less power consumptions and last but not least possible uninterrupted ongoing session when a User Equipment (UE) moves across network boundaries. On the other hand, Device-to-Device (D2D) communication as a revolutionary technology to enhance network performance has shown a great potential in dominating future communication market. Consequently, in this paper, we investigate the mobility management problem for D2D communications in heterogeneous networks. We leverage on IEEE 802.21 Media Independent Service (MIS) and propose a new framework, so-called enhanced version of IEEE 802.21 MIS that supports D2D communication (E-MIS-D2D) to enhance D2D mobility experience over heterogeneous networks. The E-MIS-D2D is a network assisted and initiated architecture, in which a load-aware mode selection algorithm is also proposed for selecting the transmission mode between D2D and non-D2D modes. Through extensive simulations, we validate that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods in terms of packet loss ratio, average throughput, latency, bandwidth usage and load rate of eNB.