Vivisecting mobility management in 5G cellular networks

Abstract

With 5G's support for diverse radio bands and different deployment modes, e.g., standalone (SA) vs. non-standalone (NSA), mobility management - especially the handover process - becomes far more complex. Measurement studies have shown that frequent handovers cause wild fluctuations in 5G throughput, and worst, service outages. Through a cross-country (6,200 km+) driving trip, we conduct in-depth measurements to study the current 5G mobility management practices adopted by three major U.S. carriers. Using this rich dataset, we carry out a systematic analysis to uncover the handover mechanisms employed by 5G carriers, and compare them along several dimensions such as (4G vs. 5G) radio technologies, radio (low-, mid- & high-)bands, and deployment (SA vs. NSA) modes. We further quantify the impact of mobility on application performance, power consumption, and signaling overheads. We identify key challenges facing today's NSA 5G deployments which result in unnecessary handovers and reduced coverage. Finally, we design a holistic handover prediction system Prognos and demonstrate its ability to improve QoE for two 5G applications 16K panoramic VoD and realtime volumetric video streaming. We have released the artifacts of our study at https://github.com/SIGCOMM22-5GMobility/artifact.