Vivisecting mobility management in 5G cellular networks

Ahmad Hassan, Arvind Narayanan, Anlan Zhang, Wei Ye, Ruiyang Zhu, Shuowei Jin, Jason Carpenter, Z. Morley Mao, Feng Qian, Zhi Li Zhang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

35 Scopus citations

Abstract

With 5G's support for diverse radio bands and different deployment modes, e.g., standalone (SA) vs. non-standalone (NSA), mobility management-especially the handover process-becomes far more complex. Measurement studies have shown that frequent handovers cause wild fluctuations in 5G throughput, and worst, service outages. Through a cross-country (6,200 km+) driving trip, we conduct in-depth measurements to study the current 5G mobility management practices adopted by three major U.S. carriers. Using this rich dataset, we carry out a systematic analysis to uncover the handover mechanisms employed by 5G carriers, and compare them along several dimensions such as (4G vs. 5G) radio technologies, radio (low-, mid-high-)bands, and deployment (SA vs. NSA) modes. We further quantify the impact of mobility on application performance, power consumption, and signaling overheads. We identify key challenges facing today's NSA 5G deployments which result in unnecessary handovers and reduced coverage. Finally, we design a holistic handover prediction system Prognos and demonstrate its ability to improve QoE for two 5G applications 16K panoramic VoD and realtime volumetric video streaming. We have released the artifacts of our study at https://github.com/SIGCOMM22-5GMobility/artifact.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationSIGCOMM 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages86-100
Number of pages15
ISBN (Electronic)9781450394208
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 22 2022
Event2022 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM 2022 - Amsterdam, Netherlands
Duration: Aug 22 2022Aug 26 2022

Publication series

NameSIGCOMM 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference

Conference

Conference2022 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM 2022
Country/TerritoryNetherlands
CityAmsterdam
Period8/22/228/26/22

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We thank our shepherd Kyle Jamieson and the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and feedback. This research was in part supported by NSF under Grants CNS-1836772, CNS-1901103, CNS-1915122, CMMI-2038559, CNS-2106771, CNS-2128489, CNS-2112562, CMMI-2038215, CNS-1930041, an MnRI (Minnesota Robotics Institute) Seed Grant, and a Cisco University Research Grant.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 ACM.

Keywords

  • 5G
  • application performance
  • coverage
  • dataset
  • energy
  • handover
  • handover prediction
  • mobility
  • mobility management
  • network measurement

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