mmWave network with dual connectivity to improve mobility performance
The performance in mobility scenarios currently prevents mmWave from being used in cellular networks. Indeed, as described here, mmWave links suffer from blockage from obstacles such as the human body, vehicles, buildings, etc. Moreover, mmWave cells will cover a small area, and require a dense deployment. As the user moves, it may suddenly lose the connectivity to the current mmWave base station. It may even be in outage with respect to all of the cells. The mobility management under these hypothesis becomes challenging: the number of handovers and/or beam switch events increases, and the solutions adopted in traditional networks are not enough. Indeed, if the mobile terminal connects to a single Radio Access Network at any given time, an outage event would require a Radio Link Failure or a long and complex inter-RAT handover, for example to a legacy LTE network.

We propose a mobility management solution which relies on dual connectivity. The mobile user connects to an LTE and a mmWave base station at the same time. Moreover, a local mobility anchor coordinates each group of mmWave base station. Therefore, there is no need to interact with the core network for local mobility. The user plane is split at the PDCP layer.

This architecture makes it possible to:

  • Collect channel measurements and track the optimal base station for each mobile user;
  • Design faster network procedures, to quickly switch from LTE to mmWave and viceversa, and to perform a swift secondary cell handover without any interaction with the core network.

The dual connectivity architecture was analyzed with a first-of-its-kind simulation campaign. It combined a mmWave dynamic channel model and end-to-end TCP/IP and cellular network protocol stacks, using the tool described in the Simulation page. The channel model used experimental traces to model the transition between LOS and NLOS and vice versa. Our architecture is able to better adapt to the dynamic mmWave channel conditions than a traditional single connectivity solution. Therefore, it obtains a lower latency and smaller throughput variations. This increases the robustness of the network, enhancing the quality of experience of the mobile user.

LIST OF RELATED PUBLICATIONS

Title DateArea
Lorenzo Bertizzolo, Michele Polese, Leonardo Bonati, Abhimanyu Gosain, Michele Zorzi, Tommaso Melodia, "mmBAC: Location-aided mmWave Backhaul Management for UAV-based Aerial Cells", in Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Workshop on Millimeter-Wave Networks and Sensing Systems 2019 (co-located with Mobicom 2019)
arXiv

ACM

2019/10Initial Access, Tracking, Mobility
Michele Polese, Francesco Restuccia, Abhimanyu Gosain, Josep Jornet, Shubhendu Bhardwaj, Viduneth Ariyarathna, Soumyajit Mandal, Kai Zheng, Aditya Dhananjay, Marco Mezzavilla, James Buckwalter, Mark Rodwell, Xin Wang, Michele Zorzi, Arjuna Madanayake, Tommaso Melodia, "MillimeTera: Toward A Large-Scale Open-Source mmWave and Terahertz Experimental Testbed", in Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Workshop on Millimeter-Wave Networks and Sensing Systems 2019 (co-located with Mobicom 2019)
ACM

2019/10Testbed, Mobility, Simulation, 6G
William Xia, Michele Polese, Marco Mezzavilla, Giuseppe Loianno, Sundeep Rangan, Michele Zorzi, "Millimeter Wave Remote UAV Control and Communications for Public Safety Scenarios", in 1st International Workshop on Internet of Autonomous Unmanned Vehicles, co-located with SECON 2019, Boston, June 2019
IEEE Xplore
2019/06Mobility, Public Safety, 6G
M. Ericson, P. Spapis, M. Säily, K. Pedersen, Y. Qi, N. Barati, T. Svensson, M. Shariat, M. Giordani, M. Mezzavilla, M. Doll, H. Miao, C. Zhou, "Initial Access, RRC and Mobility", Wiley, 20182018/06Initial Access, Tracking, Mobility
T. Zugno, M. Polese, M. Zorzi, " Integration of Carrier Aggregation and Dual Connectivity for the ns-3 mmWave Module", to be presented at WNS3 2018
arXiv
2018/06Simulation, Mobility
M. Polese, M. Zorzi, "Impact of Channel Models on the End-to-End Performance of mmWave Cellular Networks", IEEE SPAWC 2018, Kalamata, Greece
arXiv
2018/06Simulation, Mobility
M. Polese, M. Mezzavilla, S. Rangan, M. Zorzi, "Mobility Management for TCP in mmWave Networks", in Proceedings of the 1st ACM Workshop on Millimeter-Wave Networks and Sensing Systems 2017 (co-located with Mobicom 2017)
ACM
2017/10Transport, Mobility
M. Polese, M. Giordani, M. Mezzavilla, S. Rangan, and M. Zorzi, “Improved Handover Through Dual Connectivity in 5G mmWave Mobile Networks”, to appear on IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC)
IEEE Xplore

arXiv
2017/09Mobility, Transport, Simulation
M. Giordani, M. Mezzavilla, S. Rangan, and M. Zorzi, “An Efficient Uplink Multi-Connectivity Scheme for 5G mmWave Control Plane Applications", submitted to IEEE Transaction on Wireless Communications
arXiv
2017/07Tracking, Mobility
M. Polese, M. Mezzavilla, and M. Zorzi, “Performance Comparison of Dual Connectivity and Hard Handover for LTE-5G Tight Integration,” in SIMUTools 2016
ACM

arXiv
2016/08Simulation, Mobility
M. Giordani, M. Mezzavilla, S. Rangan, and M. Zorzi, “Multi-Connectivity in 5G mmWave cellular networks,” in IEEE 15th Annual Mediterranean Ad Hoc Networking Workshop
IEEE Xplore

arXiv
2016/06Mobility, Tracking
Mezzavilla, M., Goyal, S., Panwar, S., Rangan, S., and Zorzi, M., An mdp model for optimal handover decisions in mmWave cellular networks, in Proceedings of European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC), June 2016, Athens, Greece
IEEE Xplore

arXiv

2016/06Mobility