Dual Connectivity-Based Mobility Management and Data Split Mechanism in 4G/5G Cellular Networks

The emerging 5G mobile network technology is envisioned to provide an efficient platform to interconnect machines, objects, and devices in addition to interconnecting people. Equipped with peak data rates, low latency, and massive capacity, 5G technology will empower new user experiences such as virtual reality and augmented reality and provide new service areas such as connecting massive IoT. Dual connectivity is an important feature where 5G systems are overlaid on the existing 4G core network. In this paper, we propose an MM (mobility management) algorithm to efficiently perform handovers between 4G and 5G RATs (radio access technologies). Our proposed MM algorithm utilizes the strength of DC (dual connectivity) for MM as DC inherently has lesser amount of handover interruption as compared to conventional hard handover. Our MM scheme suggests appropriate data split mechanism between 4G and 5G RATs based on application-specific strategy. We provide a framework based on probabilistic model checking that leverages DC and suggests strategy-based data split mechanism for a mobile user for a variety of market verticals. We model the system as MDP (Markov decision process) where a controller breaks all the nondeterminism in the MDP based on reward calculations. The proposed framework is implemented in a well known model checker and various scenarios are used to assess its applicability.