NO Stack for Enhancing Mobility Performance in 5G Radio Access Network

Small cell strategy is to meet the surging demand for traffic in future 5G networks, but it inevitably causes frequent handover between cells. Existing Long Term Evolution(LTE) architecture is afflicted with complex protocols and a hardship to deal with redundant signaling during a handover procedure. Investigations in this paper focus on the improvement for a handover procedure by adopting Not Only Stack (NO Stack) to a radio access network (RAN), named NOS-RAN. NO Stack is emerging technology that attaches importance to the centralized control logic and flat protocols, so that it facilitates to simplify signaling interactions. We analyze delay budget and signaling overhead in the handover time in NOS-RAN, and compare them against LTE access radio networks (LTE-RAN). Simulation evaluations on NS3 are performed to validate that the proposed NOS-RAN architecture achieves considerable decline of the delay and the signaling overhead during the handover.