Handover (HO) management is one of the most crucial tasks in dense cellular networks with mobile users. A problem in the HO management is to deal with increasing HOs due to network densification in the 5G evolution and various HO skipping techniques have so far been studied in the literature to suppress excessive HOs. In this paper, we propose yet another HO skipping scheme, called periodic HO skipping. The proposed scheme prohibits the HOs of a mobile user equipment (UE) for a certain period of time, referred to as skipping period, thereby enabling flexible operation of the HO skipping by adjusting the length of the skipping period. We investigate the performance of the proposed scheme on the basis of stochastic geometry. Specifically, we derive analytical expressions of two performance metrics -- the HO rate and the expected downlink data rate -- when a UE adopts the periodic HO skipping. Numerical results based on the analysis demonstrate that the periodic HO skipping scenario can outperform the scenario without any HO skipping in terms of a certain utility metric representing the trade-off between the HO rate and the expected downlink data rate, in particular when the UE moves fast. Furthermore, we numerically show that there can exist an optimal length of the skipping period, which locally maximizes the utility metric, and approximately provide the optimal skipping period in a simple form. Numerical comparison with some other HO skipping techniques is also conducted.

翻译：切换管理是密集蜂窝网络中移动用户最关键的任务之一。在5G演进过程中，切换管理面临的一个问题是网络密集化导致的切换次数增加，目前文献中已研究多种切换跳过技术以抑制过度切换。本文提出一种新的切换跳过方案，称为周期性切换跳过。该方案禁止移动用户设备在特定时间段（称为跳过周期）内进行切换，从而通过调整跳过周期长度实现切换跳过的灵活操作。我们基于随机几何理论研究所提方案的性能。具体而言，当用户设备采用周期性切换跳过时，我们推导出两个性能指标——切换速率和期望下行数据速率——的解析表达式。基于分析的数值结果表明，在表示切换速率与期望下行数据速率之间权衡的特定效用指标方面，周期性切换跳过场景可以优于无切换跳过场景，尤其是在用户设备快速移动时。此外，数值分析表明存在一个能够局部最大化该效用指标的最优跳过周期长度，并以简洁形式近似给出了最优跳过周期。本文还与若干其他切换跳过技术进行了数值比较。