Mobility Support in Cellular Networks

Abstract

In this paper, we conduct the first global-scale measurement study to unveil how 30 mobile operators manage mobility support in their carrier networks. Using a novel, device-centric tool, MMLab, we are able to crawl runtime configurations without the assistance from operators. Using handoff configurations from 32,000+ cells and > 18,700 handoff instances, we uncover how policy-based handoffs work in practice. We further study how the configuration parameters affect the handoff performance and user data access.