Data prefetching to reduce delay in software-defined cellular networks

With the growth of mobile data and the increasing density of base stations, mobility management in future cellular networks will face great challenges. One such challenge is the high frequency of handovers. With high-frequency handovers, packet delay caused by forwarding in handovers cannot be ignored any more. In this paper, we propose a novel data prefetching strategy to reduce handover delays in cellular networks. The strategy is deployed on software-defined cellular networks, taking advantage of centralized computing capability and packet path control. According to the prediction of a user´s next location, we prefetch data packets to possible target base stations, so that the delay caused by packet forwarding in handovers can be reduced. The numerical results show that the data prefetching strategy performs very well. The average delay of the whole user group has a dramatic decrease. We also study the impacts of different parameters on system performance in this paper.