An efficient handover scheme for providing the inter-beam mobility

This paper proposes an inter-beam handover (IBH) scheme in millimeter wave (mmWave) communication systems. Since the width of a beam transmitted by a base station (BS) is very narrow, the IBH can frequently occur within a BS. For this reason, the previous handover scheme based on the radio resource control (RRC) message can cause the increase of the signaling overhead. In addition, the performance of the IBH can be dramatically deteriorated because the strength of the received signal can be rapidly decreased at the edge of a beam. To solve these problems, the proposed scheme performs the IBH by exploiting the medium access control (MAC) control element (CE) to reduce the signaling overhead, and it applies the inter-beam coordinated scheduling (IBCS) to improve the strength of the received signal at the edge of a beam.