A Modified Vehicular Handover Scheme in Non-standalone 5G Networks With the Assistance of Multi-access Edge Computing

Abstract

The 5G non-standalone (NSA) network deployment based on the legacy Evolved Packet Core (EPC) emerges a denser access cells scenario. Due to the complex mobility characteristics of vehicles and the diversified vehicular service requirements, the traditional cellular handover mechanism may not maintain high-quality network service for various connected vehicles. This paper concentrates on satisfying the network requirements of different vehicular services, keeping network load balance and avoiding unnecessary handover under the EPC-based LTE-5G RAN-level network architecture. We first develop the modified heterogeneous cellular network architecture with the assistance of the multi-access edge computing (MEC) technology, the MEC server works as a coordinator which is responsible for handover state information management and executing network selection algorithm to help vehicles access the most suitable candidate network. The network selection algorithm uses a quality of service (QoS) coverage conversion methods which calculate the QoS boundary of candidate networks to satisfy the specific service requirement and balance the network load. A long short-term memory (LSTM)-based trajectory prediction method is designed to obtain the sojourn time of a vehicle staying in the QoS boundary of candidate networks. The sojourn time acts as a vital reference for the handover decision. Further, we simplify handover signaling interaction to reduce the handover delay. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is validated in improving network handover performance and the QoS of users under several metrics.