RAN Twin-aided Handover for 6G Networks

Abstract

Handover (HO) is essential for ensuring seamless connectivity but poses significant challenges, such as HO interruption time, frequent HO, and HO failures, especially in dense urban environments with millimeter wave small-cell deployments. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel HO procedure that leverages a digital twin of the radio access network (RAN Twin), which is compatible with the 3GPP New Radio standard, Release 18. The proposed RAN Twin integrates multimodal sensing data and historical network information to generate an optimal list of candidate cells and share user equipment context data. This enables early synchronization with the target HO cell, minimizing interruption time. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the baseline 3GPP HO in terms of latency and HO rate, underscoring its potential to enhance overall network performance.