Handover with Network Slicing in 5G Networks

Abstract

The wide variety of new opportunities offered by 5G, together with the very large number of mobile devices, imposes significant challenges in network operation. Network slicing provides efficient operation of the network under these conditions by separating the slices. However, scalable and flexible approaches are required to allow for the dynamic load of the network. Network slicing is the concept of having multiple isolated virtual networks on top of the same physical infrastructure. As the result of fluctuations (due to mobility or varying offered traffic), a UE may be subject to handover between cells. The selection of the UE and the corresponding service base station (BS) may hamper utilization if the UE undergoing handover cannot be offered the same slice capacities by the destination BS. In this paper, we propose handover to increase the utilization of the radio resources by selecting the UEs that undergo handover according to the required services for each slice and the availability of those slices at the destination BS. We develop an optimization problem to optimize the radio resources and propose three heuristics to reach similar results in considerably low computing times. We simulate the results of the algorithms and show that our heuristics can present solutions close to the optimal within a short time frame.