Virtualized ANR to Manage Resources for Optimization of Neighbour Cell Lists in 5G Mobile Wireless Networks

In future, more devices such as wearable devices will be connected to the networks. This will increase simultaneous handovers. The coverage of a cell will be small because a superhigh frequency used in 5G wireless networks does not propagate very far. This trend will increase the number of neighbour cell lists and it will accelerate the change of neighbour cell lists since the coverage of cells can be altered by the environment. Meanwhile, the ANR technology will be essential in 5G networks. Since the network environment in the future is not similar to the present, the strategy of ANR should also be different from the present. First, since practical neighbour cell lists in each cell are changed frequently and individually, it is necessary to optimize them frequently and individually. Second, since the neighbour cell lists in each cell are not changed similarly, it is necessary to operate ANR flexibly. To respond to these issues, we propose to use network function virtualization (NFV) for ANR. To evaluate the proposed strategies, we measured additional resource consumption and the latency of handover if neighbour cell lists are not optimized when UEs perform handover simultaneously. These experiments are conducted using Amarisoft LTE-100 Platform.