PAPER

KOMUNIKASI DIGITAL

Cellular Handoff Rates for

Millimeterwave 5G Technology

Disusun Oleh:

NAMA

: RORIK PURWANTO

NIM

: 4613215041

TEKNIK ELEKTRO
FAKULTAS TEKNIK UNIVERSITAS PANCASILA
2016

Cellular Handoff Rates for Millimeterwave

5G Technology
Rorik Purwanto (1) rory.hazel23@hotmail.co.id
Jurusan Teknik Elektro Fakultas Teknik Universitas Pancasila
Jln. Srengseng Sawah Jagakarsa Jakarta Selatan 12640 indonesia
Abstract - The obstruction in cellular network involves the problem when a
mobile user travels from one cell to another during a call. As adjacent cell do
not use the same radio channels, a call must be transferred from one radio
channel to another when a user crosses the line between the adjacent cells.
The process of handover takes place that transfer an ongoing call from one
cell to another cell as the user moves through the coverage area of a cellular
network. There are several different reasons needed to be known to
determine whether a handover is required. The signal strength of the base
station, along signal strengths of the surrounding stations as in addition the
availability of the channels also needed to be known. The mobile monitors the
strength of the base stations in cellular network to know for the status of
channel availability and the network make decision about the handover. The
main goal of this research is to investigate the handover research issues and
developing schemes which can handle handovers traffic in order to support
on-going calls when mobile users are switching between base stations. The
final outcomes of the research will theoretical and mathematical approaches
to convince the users as possible to provide effective methods for evaluating
handover mechanisms as well as cellular network performance.
Keywords - MmWave, 5G, handoff.
I.
INTRODUCTION
Millimeterwave (mmWave) frequency bands have been identified as a
promising candidate for 5th generation (5G) cellular technology. Spectrum in
traditional cellular bands, below 6GHz, is finite and as cellular data traffic
demand continues to grow new frequency bands must be considered. Unlike
traditional cellular bands, large blocks of contiguous spectrum may be allocated at
mmWave bands allowing for bandwidths on the order of GHz or more. Moreover,
the mmWave bands allow for multi-element antenna arrays composed of very
small elements, on the order of IC chip scales, providing large antenna gain and
sufficient power output through over-the-air power combining. This combination
of large bandwidths and novel device architectures allows mmWave cellular to
provide peak rates on the order of 10 Gbps and ample capacity to meet future
demand.
However the propagation characteristics in the mmWave band are more
challenging than traditional cellular. Diffraction at mmWave bands is effectively

non-existent and propagation behaves similar to visible light. Transmission

through most objects is diminished where foliage and other common obstacles can
produce severe shadowing. Reflective power, on the other hand, is improved
offering new opportunities for completing the link. With this in mind, a cluster
network concept is envisioned where a set of coordinated access points (AP) work
together to provide ubiquitous coverage through AP diversity. In the event of
shadowing, one AP will rapidly hand off to another AP in the cluster. These
handoffs might be quite rapid as the user device moves through the network.
Moving obstacles, hand motion and changes in orientation may all contribute to
multiple, successive handoffs. This paper examines many of these scenarios and
attempts to provide a first order estimate of typical handoff rates for 5G mmWave
cellular. This handoff rate estimate will help guide network protocol design for
5G cellular. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section II, we
mention the related works. In Section III, we describe deployment scenarios for a
mmWave system.
.
II.
CHARACTERISTICS OF MMWAVE COMMUNICATIONS
The peculiar characteristics of mmWave communications should be
considered in the design of network architectures and protocols to fully exploit its
potential. We summarize and present the characteristics in the following
subsections.
A. Wireless Channel Measurement
Millimeter wave communications suffer from huge propagation loss
compared with other communication system in using lower carrier frequencies.
The rain attenuation and atmospheric and molecular absorption characteristics of
mmWave propagation limit the range of mmWave communications which is
shown in Fig. 1 and Fig. 2. However, with smaller cell sizes applied to improve
spectral efficiency today, the rain attenuation and atmospheric absorption do not
create significant additional path loss for cell sizes on the order of 200m.
Therefore, mmWave communications are mainly used for indoor environments,
and small cell access and backhaul with cell sizes on the order of 200 m.
There have been considerable work on mmWave propagation at the 60
GHz band. The free space propagation loss is proportional to the square of the
carrier frequency. With a wavelength of about 5 mm, the free space propagation
loss at 60 GHz is 28 decibels (dB) more than at 2.4 GHz.

Fig. 1 Rain attenuation at microwave and mmWave frequencies.

Fig. 2 Atmospheric and moleculasr absorption at mmWave frequencies.

Besides, the Oxygen absorption in the 60 GHz band has a peak, ranging
from 15 to 30 dB/km. The channel characterization in shows that the non-line-ofsight (NLOS) channel suffers from higher attenuation than the line-of-sight (LOS)
channel. The large scale fading F (d) can be modeled as follows.

For the small-scale propagation effects in the 60 GHz band, it is found that
the multipath effect is not obvious with directional antennas. By using circular
polarization and receiving antennas of narrow beam width, multipath reflection
can be suppressed. In the LOS channel model in the conference room
environment proposed in IEEE 802.11ad [9], the direct path contains almost all
the energy, and nearly no other multipath components exist. In this case, the
channel can be regarded as the Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel.
In the NLOS channel, there is no direct path, and the number of paths with

significant energy is small. To achieve high data rate and maximize the power
efficiency, mmWave communications mainly rely on the LOS transmission.
B. Directivity
MmWave links are inherently directional. With a small wavelength,
electronically steerable antenna arrays can be realized as patterns of metal on
circuit board. Then by controlling the phase of the signal transmitted by each
antenna element, the antenna array steers its beam towards any direction
electronically and to achieve a high gain at this direction, while offering a very
low gain in all other directions. To make the transmitter and receiver direct their
beams towards each other, the procedure of beam training is needed, and several
beam training algorithms have been proposed to reduce the required beam training
time.
C. Sensitivity to Blockage
Electromagnetic waves have weak ability to diffract around obstacles with
a size significantly larger than the wavelength. With a small wavelength, links in
the 60 GHz band are sensitive to blockage by obstacles (e.g., humans and
furniture). For example, blockage by a human penalizes the link budget by 20-30
dB. Collonge et al. conducted propagation measurements in a realistic indoor
environment in the presence of human activity, and the results show that the
channel is blocked for about 1% or 2% of the time for one to five persons. Taking
human mobility into consideration, mmWave links are intermittent. Therefore,
maintaining a reliable connection for delay-sensitive applications such as HDTV
is a big challenge for mmWave communications.
III.
DEPLOYMENT SCENARIO OF A MMWAVE NETWORK
The primary deployment scenarios of mmWave networks are expected to
be urban and semi-urban hotspot environments with high data rate and capacity
demands and it will be underlaid within a 4G LTE/LTE-A deployments. In the
following, we discuss typical deployment scenarios.
A. Street-side
MmWave access point deployments on the street side are targeted to
provide services to pedestrians on the street, streetside open-air restaurants
customers etc. In a typical deployment, APs will be installed on street poles or
other structures at an elevated position to avoid large scale blocking by obstacles,
but not so high that the short range of the airinterface affects the links. To ensure
enough coverage, Aps need to be deployed at intervals of street blocks, possibly
on both sides of the street.
B. Campus/courtyard
In a university or college campus, a possible deployment area is the
courtyards in front of the classroom buildings. Other similar scenarios are open air
tourist spots.

C. Stadium
In a stadium users may use mmWave high data rate services for
augmented reality or shared experience. Access point deployments should be able
to provide sufficient coverage to users covering the various action moments of the
events.
IV.

HANDOFF EVENTS IN A MMWAVE AIR INTERFACE DEPLOYMENT

The characteristics of the handoff events in various deployment scenarios,
thus, are determined by the nature of the obstacles and the user behaviors
impacting the terminal orientation. For example, in a street-side, obstacles can be
trees lining the avenue, passing vehicles, pedestrians; in a campus/courtyard
environment, the primary obstacles are the pedestrian. The primary sources of
handoff due to user terminal orientation are: user hand movements, user rotation
etc., which can happen in all of the deployment scenarios considered above. The
different handoff events in a mmWave access network can be categorized into the
following four fundamental types:
1) Fixed obstacles: Handoffs due to users moving past fixed obstacles
2) Moving obstacles: Handoffs caused by passing vehicles obstructing the
AP
3) Rotation: Handoffs caused by user hand movement and rotations
4) Human obstacles: Handoffs due to blocking of APs by pedestrians.
In the rest of this paper, we analyze these handoff events and provide an
estimate of the handoff rates (or its inverse metric handoff interval) for each of
them. The methodology used in the paper is to analyze a typical deployment
scenario which is a representative of the handover category.
A. Fixed obstacles
A typical deployment scenario where handoff events are generated by
fixed obstacles is a tree-lined street. In Figure 3-4, example handoff events are
shown in such a deployment for various numbers of obstacles in a 100m long
street block. In Figure 2, the trivial case of one single obstacle located midway
between the two access points, AP1 and AP2 is illustrated. Initially, the user is
connected to AP1 at time instant t=0. As the user walks down the street at the
speed of 3km/h, its LOS to AP1 is obstructed by the obstacle at time t=63.5s. At
this point, the user is in LOS of AP2 and a handover occurs from AP1 to AP2.
The user then continues to remain connected to AP2 for the rest of the block. In
Figure 4, the handoff events are illustrated for a more complex scenario of 3
obstacles. The user alternates between AP1 and AP2 as it moves along the
sidewalk. The obstacle O1 generates a handoff at t=16.5sec; the front edge of the
obstacle O2 generates two handoffs: first, at t=42.4s when the terminal loses LOS
to AP2 and handoffs to AP1, secondly at t=63.5s when it loses the LOS to AP1
and handoffs back to AP2. Similarly the front edge of O3 also generates two
handoffs. In a general scenario with a large number of obstacles in the street
block, it can be concluded that two handoffs occur for each obstacle.

Figure 3. Handoff events for one fix obstacle

Figure 4. Handoff events for 3 fixed obstacles

In order to get an analytical estimate of the handover rate, we consider a
deployment scenario of obstacles of infinitesimally small width (Figure 3) so that
outage does not occur. It is assumed that, whenever the users LOS to its current
AP is obstructed, it rapidly switches to another supporting AP and then eventually
return to the original AP when it encounters an obstacle to the supporting AP.

Figure 5. Handoff rate estimation for fixed obstacles

The number of obstacles encountered by the user which trigger handoffs,
depends on the obstacle position in the street and the obstacle spacing, defined as
the center-to-center gap between adjacent obstacles.

B. Moving obstacles
In this category the primary obstacles which cause handoffs are moving
vehicles, such as large trucks that are high enough to block the LOS between the
AP and user; cars and bikes are not likely to interrupt the link because the Aps are
typically mounted at an elevated position. The handoff events due to passing
trucks are illustrated in Figure 6. Assume that the user is initially connected to the
access point AP2. The truck TR1 blocks the LOS of the user to AP2 at time t=t1
forcing the user to handoff to AP1. Then at time t=t1+t2, TR1 blocks the LOS of
the user to AP1. Thus, it can be observed that, two handoff events occur for every

passing truck (except at the initial ramping up period from an empty street in
cases with very high truck arrival rate). Thus it can be concluded that the average
handoff rate is 2/T handoff/sec where T is the truck inter-arrival time in sec.

Figure 6. Handoff event for a moving obstacle

C. Rotation
The rotational motions which may cause link disruption and handoff can
fall into one of the following four classes:
1) Reflexive Movement
2) Live action
3) Incidental Motion
4) Unattented
In the following each of these classes of handoff events are discussed in
details.
Reflexive Movement:
This type of movements occurs when the user reacts to external events.
The user may make a turn to interact with his virtual or augmented world when
surprised by an event. If the angle of rotation is large enough, it may result in a
handoff. The typical application scenario can be shared experience. These are
occasional events and the angle of rotation can range from 90deg to 180deg,
resulting in one or two handoffs.
Live Action:
Users filming live actions can generate frequent handoff events. Typical
application scenario is shared experience. For example, viewers of various sports
events, such as tennis match, little league game, cricket or a soccer match in a
stadium may use his/her 5G-enabled handheld device or Google glass to relay the
live events in the stadium to their remotely located peers. Here we will estimate
the handoff rate for two representative events: a tennis rally and soccer goal kicks
and volleys.
The length of a standard tennis court is 120ft. Considering the case when a
viewer is seated about 65ft distance from the center of the court and at the

midpoint of the court length, it can be estimated that, when the viewer follows a
shot from one extreme of the court to the other extreme, the angle of rotation is
about 85deg. From the Youtube video clip of a tennis rally in the Australian Open
tournament, it was found that 72 volleys in the rally were completed in 95sec.
Thus the average handoff interval was about 1.3sec, assuming that one handoff is
required to cover each volley.
The length of a standard soccer field is 288ft and the typical distance of a
viewer from the center of the field is about 132.5ft. The angle of rotation to follow
a goal kick from one end of the field to the other is about 94deg. The speed of the
ball can range from 75km/h to 103Km/h. based on these data, it can be estimated
that for following long goal kicks and return volleys, a burst of handoffs may be
required at an average interval in the range of 3.1sec-4.2sec.
Incidental Motion:
These types of rotational motions are associated with either calm movements
during low-stress activities, e.g. fidgeting, or purposeful movements while
performing a task. Typical applications scenario in which such motion can happen
are shared experience, augmented reality. A typical turn has an angle of rotation
of 90deg. Based on a few measurements an estimated rotational speed was found
to be 20 rotations/sec. Assuming that a handoff is required for every 90deg turn,
the estimated handoff interval is about 0.75 sec on average.
Unattended:
A link failure can happen due to inadvertent movements of the user that
results in change in orientation of the terminal. It is also possible that the user
inadvertently stores it away in his pocket, brief case or just set it on the table after
initiating a communication. Typical application scenario in which these types of
movements can happen are seamless cloud storage, grabn go purchases etc. It is
possible to have prolonged blockages in the scenario when the terminal is in an
orientation or location such that it is out of the radio link coverage of all nearby
APs; thus handoff may not happen at all. The expected scenario in such a
condition is that, the very high data rate and ultra-low latency of the 5G network
ensures the service is completed before the terminal goes out of coverage.
D.
Pedestrian obstacles
Since the APs are most likely to be mounted at a position significantly higher
than typical human height, pedestrians only close to the user are likely to block
the link between the terminal and the AP and may cause a handoff. It is a common
perception that pedestrian movements can be random; however, depending on the
deployment location, characteristics of handoff occurrences can be different. In
this paper the handoff events generated due to pedestrian blockings are classified
into three categories: single encounter, group or pack and dense crowd.
Single encounter:
These types of events commonly occur in the street-side deployments.
Although, random movements of pedestrians are conceivable in a street as
illustrated in Figure 7a and 7b, in the most common scenario, movements of the
pedestrians are streamlined and restricted to the street-side, as shown in Figure 7c.
In the most likely scenario a user may be obstructed by a pedestrian passing from

the opposite direction or possibly by someone walking in the same direction and
passing him/her at a faster speed. The handoff rate in this scenario depends on the
pedestrian density in the sidewalk and can be estimated in a way similar to the
moving obstacles scenario.

Figure 7. Pedestrian obstacle scenarios in a secret

Group or pack:
Users in a group (e.g. tourists) can often obstruct other users (in the group)
access to an AP. In this scenario, users and obstacles can be moving at similar
speed (~1-3Km/h) in the same direction. In the rare situation persistent blocking is
possible. The most likely application scenarios are shared experience and
augmented reality. Typical deployment scenarios where these handoff events may
occur are: streetside, courtyard or tourist spot. However these handoff events are
rare if the APs are mounted at high enough positions.
Dense crowd:
In this scenario, users are blocked from their AP connectivity by movements
of pedestrians, which can potentially be semi-random. The deployment scenarios
where such handoff events may occur are: fairgrounds, college campuses, tourist
hotspots etc. Courtyard scenario in a university campus is shown which consists
of walkways around and across a lawn. Pedestrians are most likely to use the
walkways, although occasionally straying into the lawn. Since pedestrians only
close to the user can block the LOS to the AP, users close to the walkways are
likely to experience frequent handoffs. More complex models of pedestrian
behavior in such deployments will be studied in a future work.
SMART MOBILITY MANAGEMENT FOR DEVICE-TO-DEVICE (D2D)
COMMUNICATION
In our solutions we assume that the D2D resource usage and coordination are
under the networks control. This is due to the fact that in-band D2D operation, as
an underlay for cellular communications, requires the networks control on D2D
radio resources in order to provide optimized resource utilization, minimized
interference among D2D links and from D2D links to cellular link, as well as
more robust mobility. Enabling very low latency data communications between
V.

end-users is one of the distinctive advantages expected from D2D

communications. However, when several base stations (BSs), which are
connected to each other via a non-ideal backhaul, are involved in the D2D radio
resource control, the quality of service requirement in terms of latency may not be
satisfied due to large backhaul delay. Furthermore, the additional control overhead
is expected due to the exchange of necessary information between controlling
nodes as depicted.

A. D2D-Aware Handover Solution

D2D-aware handover solution is introduced to minimize the E2E latency
in D2D communications and reduce the network signaling overhead in case of
DUE mobility.

Figure 8. DND control and communications before and after cellular handover
execution
As shown in Figure 3a, a D2D pair is initially controlled by the same BS.
Figure 3b depicts that one of the DUEs, UE1, may move toward BS2 when
fulfilling the regular cellular handover condition, such as event A3 [8] in which
the received signal strength of neighbor cell becomes an offset better than
primary cell, i.e., RSRPtarget RSRPsource > offset. However, to reduce the
latency and signaling overhead, it is beneficial to keep the D2D pair controlled by
the same BS. Otherwise, when the DUEs are under the control of different BSs,
there can be potential performance degradation, for instance, due to possible
Asynchronous BSs. Using the regular handover condition for each DUE
independently does not guarantee this. Therefore, we propose D2D-aware
handover solution which enables BS1to postpone the handover of at least the D2D
control (or both D2D control and cellular connectivity) to BS2 unless the signal

quality of BS1 becomes worse than a predefined D2D control condition which is
defined as the minimal requirement in terms of link quality to maintain the D2D
control. D2D control condition can be set according to, for example, signaltointerference- plus-noise-ratio (SINR) threshold (e.g., -6 dB in our performance
evaluations). However, when the signal quality of BS2 is able to fulfill the D2D
control condition for both UE1 and UE2, a joint handover to BS2, which
providethe best SINR among all the candidate target cells, is enabled by D2Daware handover solution.
B. D2D-Triggered Handover Solution
With D2D-triggered handover solution, we propose to cluster the members
of a D2D group within a minimum number of cells or BSs in order to reduce
the network signaling overhead caused by the inter-BS information exchange,
such as

Figure 9. D2Dcontrol and communications during the DUE mobility

between different sites.
Related to D2D radio resource usage. The solution targets the scenarios
where D2D groups are dynamically formed by more than two DUEs. The solution
can be applied when DUEs taking part in a D2D group are varying in time, for
instance, due to the mobility.

Figure 10. Signaling flow-chart depicts how D2D-triggered handover solution

selects the target cell for handing over D2D control of a new member to
participate in D2D group communications.

Figure 10 illustrates a signaling flow-chart that depicts how D2D-triggered

handover solution selects the target cell for handing over the D2D control of a
new DUE (UEn) to join D2D group communications. D2D-triggered handover
solution first checks whether UEn can be controlled by the same cell (BS2-Cell1)
or the BS (BS2) that controls the majority of the members in the respective D2D
group. In this example, the same cell cannot be selected to hand over the D2D
control of UEn, however, the second best target cell (BS2-Cell2), which is under
the same BS with the best target cell, can be selected to minimize the control
overhead. The reasons why the same cell cannot be selected are expected to be the
admission control or the D2D control condition.
VI.
CONCLUSION
In a mmWave access network handoffs may occur due to obstacles
between the user and the access points, user movements and change in user
terminal orientation. In this paper we have attempted to make a first order
estimate of the handoff rates in a mmWave 5G access network for typical
deployment scenarios. The estimated average handoff intervals are summarized in
Table 1. Results from the analysis show that, for pedestrian users in a tree-lined
street, the average handoff event intervals due to the fixed obstacles are about
11.6sec. Typical handoff interval due to moving obstacles, such as trucks in a
street, can be about 6sec. In a dense crowd scenario, handoff intervals due to
pedestrians blocking the LOS to the APs can exceed 1 handoff/sec only when the
residual crowd density is very high. Among all the handoff events, certain types
of rotational motions appear to be most demanding in terms of handoff overhead.

For example, users following a live action, such as a tennis rally, the average
handoff interval can be about 1.3sec. Incidental motions, such as calm fidgeting,
can even generate handoff events at sub-second intervals (about 0.75sec). These
high rates of handoff events in a mmWave air-interface can be handled by
properly designing the handoff architecture and the MAC layer.

Table 1. Summary os estimated handoff intervals

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