The millimeter wave (mmWave) bands offer the possibility of orders of magnitude greater throughput for fifth-generation (5G) cellular systems. However, since mmWave signals are highly susceptible to blockage, channel quality on any one mmWave link can be extremely intermittent. This paper implements a novel dual connectivity protocol that enables mobile user equipment devices to maintain physical layer connections to 4G and 5G cells simultaneously. A novel uplink control signaling system combined with a local coordinator enables rapid path switching in the event of failures on any one link. This paper provides the first comprehensive end-to-end evaluation of handover mechanisms in mmWave cellular systems. The simulation framework includes detailed measurement-based channel models to realistically capture spatial dynamics of blocking events, as well as the full details of Medium Access Control, Radio Link Control, and transport protocols. Compared with conventional handover mechanisms, this paper reveals significant benefits of the proposed method under several metrics.
Dual connectivity to different types of cells (e.g., macro and pico cells) has been proposed in Release @math of Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) @cite_1 and in @cite_32 . However, these systems were designed for conventional sub-6 GHz frequencies, and the directionality and variability of the channels typical of mmWave frequencies were not addressed. Some other previous works, such as @cite_3 , consider only the bands under @math GHz for the control channel of 5G networks, to provide robustness against blockage and a wider coverage range, but this solution could not provide the high capacities that can be obtained when exploiting mmWave frequencies. The potential of combining legacy and mmWave technologies in outdoor scenarios has also been investigated in @cite_13 , highlighting the significant benefits that a mmWave network achieves with flexible, dynamic support from LTE technologies. Articles @cite_11 @cite_16 propose a multi-connectivity framework as a solution for mobility-related link failures and throughput degradation of cell-edge users, enabling increased reliability with different levels of mobility.
@cite_1 @cite_32 @cite_3 @cite_16 @cite_13 @cite_11
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Millimeter wave (mmWave) links will offer high capacity but are poor at penetrating into or diffracting around solid objects. Thus, we consider a hybrid cellular network with traditional sub-6 GHz macrocells coexisting with denser mmWave small cells, where a mobile user can connect to either opportunistically. We develop a general analytical model to characterize and derive the uplink and downlink cell association in the view of the signal-to-interference-and-noise-ratio and rate coverage probabilities in such a mixed deployment. We offer extensive validation of these analytical results (which rely on several simplifying assumptions) with simulation results. Using the analytical results, different decoupled uplink and downlink cell association strategies are investigated and their superiority is shown compared with the traditional coupled approach. Finally, small cell biasing in mmWave is studied, and we show that unprecedented biasing values are desirable due to the wide bandwidth. Heterogeneous networks consisting of small cells (e.g. femtocells) are capable of achieving high capacity and improving indoor cellular coverage area, while the fractional frequency reuse (FFR) scheme has been proposed for upcoming and future cellular systems to improve spectral efficiency in cellular OFDM networks. In two-tier networks of macrocells layered with femtocells, the resource allocation will most likely be sharing the same licensed spectrum. In this paper, we formulate a simple femtocells resource allocation strategies that allows a femtocells base station (FBS) to allocate more resources (co-channel) in high usage areas such as commercial FBS (cFBS) and orthogonal resource allocation for randomly deployed home user FBS (hFBS). We analyze our strategy in a multi-cell systems using area spectral efficiency (ASE) in composite fading consisting of Nakagami-m fading, path-loss and log-normal shadowing. Analytical and simulation results show that our simple resource allocation strategies are able to reduce inter-tier interferences and to offer an improvement in the overall spectral efficiency of the two-tier systems. The millimeter wave (mmWave) bands offer the possibility of orders of magnitude greater throughput for fifth-generation (5G) cellular systems. However, since mmWave signals are highly susceptible to blockage, channel quality on any one mmWave link can be extremely intermittent. This paper implements a novel dual connectivity protocol that enables mobile user equipment devices to maintain physical layer connections to 4G and 5G cells simultaneously. A novel uplink control signaling system combined with a local coordinator enables rapid path switching in the event of failures on any one link. This paper provides the first comprehensive end-to-end evaluation of handover mechanisms in mmWave cellular systems. The simulation framework includes detailed measurement-based channel models to realistically capture spatial dynamics of blocking events, as well as the full details of Medium Access Control, Radio Link Control, and transport protocols. Compared with conventional handover mechanisms, this paper reveals significant benefits of the proposed method under several metrics. The approaching 5G era of cellular communications is posing stringent performance requirements. New groundbreaking applications can be enabled only by means of multi-Gbps data rates and ultra-low latencies. The spectrum scarcity at frequencies below 6 GHz stimulated a new wave of wireless research that focuses on higher bands, namely mmWave. Directionality and high penetration loss represent the key challenges when operating with such carriers. The resulting intermittent connectivity makes the user association problem even more complex and critical than in previous generations of cellular systems, where the channel was better behaved. In this paper, we aim at deriving an optimal and fair cell selection policy that encapsulates the reallocation cost of potential handovers, and captures the erratic nature of the mmWave channel. An important conclusion is that (i) if there is no, or minimal, reallocation cost, each user associates with a single BS, while (ii) for higher handover cost values, users tend to connect to multiple base stations simultaneously.