A Seamless Mobility Management Protocol in 5G Locator Identificator Split Dense Small Cells

Network densification with Small Cells (SCs) has emerged as a key technique to increase the 5G network capacity. However, in a densified network, fast mobile nodes will experience frequent handovers with a high signaling load, handover latency, and packet loss, due to the short cell radius. Indeed, Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) protocols aim to solve the shortcomings of centralized mobility management solutions such as poor scalability and non-optimal routing. However, when the cell residence time is short, DMM protocols might suffer from increased costs and limited performance. This paper proposes a localized mobility management protocol in 5G dense SCs, based on the locator identifier separation protocol, local mobility anchoring, and fast handovers concepts. The proposed scheme divides a local domain into several location service areas, each controlled by a local anchor. We provide the analytical models of several handover metrics, namely the average total signaling cost, the data delivery cost, the handover latency, and the packet loss. Numerical and simulation results show significant cost savings, up to 30 percent in signaling overhead, up to 53 percent of packet loss, and up to 90 percent of processing load reduction at the core of the network compared to the existing lisp mobile node protocol.