Delay Analysis of Group Handover for Real-Time Control over Mobile Networks

Future mobile networks will provide support for real-time control applications. The tight real-time and reliability constraints of these applications introduce novel challenges for mobility management. Legacy individual handover schemes do not sufficiently address these issues, as they do not consider physical interactions between mobile nodes. A novel group handover scheme is proposed which allows for the simultaneous handover of a group of nodes. Both the individual and the group handover are modeled as discrete-time Markov chains. Based on these models expressions for the stochastic handover delay are derived. The results are numerically evaluated in a vehicle platooning scenario. The group handover is shown to significantly reduce the handover delay in comparison to the individual handover. Furthermore, the group handover is shown to scale well when the number of vehicles increases. These improvements are shown to come at the cost of an increased messaging overhead.