The SMART handoff policy for millimeter wave heterogeneous cellular networks

Sun, Y. , Feng, G., Qin, S., Liang, Y.-C. and Yum, P. T.-S. (2018) The SMART handoff policy for millimeter wave heterogeneous cellular networks. IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 17(6), pp. 1456-1468. (doi: 10.1109/TMC.2017.2762668)

Abstract

The millimeter wave (mmWave) radio band is promising for the next-generation heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets) due to its large bandwidth available for meeting the increasing demand of mobile traffic. However, the unique propagation characteristics at mmWave band cause huge redundant handoffs in mmWave HetNets that brings heavy signaling overhead, low energy efficiency and increased user equipment (UE) outage probability if conventional Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) based handoff mechanism is used. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning based handoff policy named SMART to reduce the number of handoffs while maintaining user Quality of Service (QoS) requirements in mmWave HetNets. In SMART, we determine handoff trigger conditions by taking into account both mmWave channel characteristics and QoS requirements of UEs. Furthermore, we propose reinforcement-learning based BS selection algorithms for different UE densities. Numerical results show that in typical scenarios, SMART can significantly reduce the number of handoffs when compared with traditional handoff policies without learning.

• Item Type: Articles
• Additional Information: This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China under Grant number 61631005 and 61471089, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant number ZYGX2015Z005.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Sun, Dr Yao and Feng, Professor Gang
• Authors: Sun, Y., Feng, G., Qin, S., Liang, Y.-C., and Yum, P. T.-S.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Engineering
• Journal Name: IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
• Publisher: IEEE
• ISSN: 1536-1233
• ISSN (Online): 1558-0660
• Published Online: 13 October 2017
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2017 IEEE
• First Published: First published in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing 17(6): 1456-1468
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced in accordance with the publisher copyright policy