A.17 Monitoring of handovers

28.5523GPP5G performance measurementsManagement and orchestrationRelease 18TS

Mobility is one of the most significant feature of the mobile networks, and handover is one typical action of the mobility. The handover failure would cause service discontinuation, thus the performance of the handover has direct impact to the user experience.The handover procedure includes handover preparation, handover resource allocation and handover execution, and the performance related to handover needs to be monitored for each phase. The resources (e.g., PDU Session Resource) need to be prepared and allocated for a handover according to the QoS requirements for each S-NSSAI.

The handover could occur intra-gNB and inter-gNB for 5G networks, and for inter-gNB case the handover could happen via NG or Xn interface. The handover could occur Intra-frequency and Inter-frequency for 5G networks. The handover could also occur between 5GS and EPS.

It is also important to have information about the used beams in the source and target cells in order to optimize the handover performance taking beam ids into account.

For the handover failures, the measurements with specific causes are required for trouble shooting.

The handover parameters setting could be specific for each NCR, and the handover performance could vary significantly for different NCRs, therefore the performance needs to be measured per NCR to support handover parameters optimization when necessary.