Dr Chiew-Foong Kwong, a mobile communications expert from the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC), recently developed an intelligent handover decision scheme for 5G network, offering a promising solution to fix its connectivity challenge.
Dr Chiew-Foong Kwong (centre) and his team are doing a measuring campaign on campus
The breakthrough technology of 5G depicts a future where every device is connected and can talk to one another in a seamless fashion. One of the goals of 5G is to minimise the average delay time between the sending and receiving of information, also known as latency, down to less than one millisecond. However according to Dr Kwong, one of the bottleneck problems in reaching the latency goal is to have an efficient handover algorithm.
A handover is a process that occurs when a mobile device switches its connection during movement to achieve uninterrupted data transmission. An ill-designed handover algorithm would adversely impact connectivity and cause increased latency.
“The conventional handover decision mechanism designed during the 4G era doesn’t work very well for 5G.” Dr Kwong said. “It does not sufficiently address the problem of frequent and unnecessary handovers, which affects not only the quality of service, but also increases latency.”
Together with his PhD students Qianyu Liu and Lincan Li, the solution Dr Kwong proposes is an adaptive and predictive handover management algorithm based on machine learning techniques. The algorithm can produce a sequence of enhanced decisions covering whether to trigger a handover, which base station to hand off to, and subsequently the correct timing for handoff. The algorithm also can accurately predict user movement to further shortens latency.
During validation testing, Dr Kwong’s algorithm proved to be able to reduce the handover failure rate by 75% and minimise the number of unnecessary handovers by over 90%. As a result, the latency is reduced by 27%. His work has led to multiple publications on the world’s leading journals indexed by the Science Citation Index.
Dr Kwong is now looking at taking his research to the next level, which includes patenting the algorithm and developing an energy-efficient handover mechanism. He is also closely working with other researchers and industries to bring the research from lab to land, especially to improve the connectivity performance of safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving.
Dr Chiew-Foong Kwong is an Assistant Professor in Electrical & Electronic Engineering at UNNC. His work is supported by Ningbo Natural Science Foundation.
Published on 21 January 2021