Handoff Rates for Millimeterwave 5G Systems

Millimeterwave band is a promising candidate for 5th generation wireless access technology to deliver peak and cell-edge data rates of the order of 10 Gbps and 100 Mbps, respectively, and to meet the future capacity demands. The main advantages of the millimeterwave band are availability of large blocks of contiguous bandwidth and the opportunity of using large antenna arrays composed of very small antenna elements to provide large antenna gains. The line-of-sight operation requirement in this band, due to its unique propagation characteristics, makes it necessary to build the network with enough redundancy of access points and the users may have to frequently handoff from one access point to another whenever its radio link is disrupted by obstacles. In this paper we investigate the handoff rate in such an access network. Based on analysis of various deployment scenarios, we observe that, typical average handoff interval is several seconds, although for certain types of user actions the average handoff interval can be as low as 0.75 sec.