Performance Analysis for Mobility Management of Dual Connectivity in HetNet

Abstract

Dual connectivity (DC) is regarded as a promising technology to increase users’ throughput, provide radio link robustness, and improve load-balancing among base stations (BSs). However, since the introduction of DC makes the mobility of network more complex and diversified, especially the mobility management of heterogeneous networks (HetNets) based on DC faces great challenges. Taking event-A3-based measurement report as the trigger condition for handover (HO), this paper compares and evaluates the influences of HO of master nodes (MNs) and secondary nodes (SNs) on link reliability in different bearing modes. Particularly, hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ), throughput, channel quality indicators (CQIs), and data packets queuing time are taken as link reliability analysis indicators. Besides, we study how DC utilizes the traffic split ratio between MNs and SNs to maximize the superiority of throughput. Simulation results show that DC can effectively reduce the impact of HO on the number of HARQ and increase the throughput of users. When the data traffic is tilted to the secondary nodes, the superiority of throughput is more obvious.

Keywords

dual connectivity / heterogeneous network (HetNet) / mobility management / traffic split ratio