ACC: Aerial Cell Cloning protocol for efficient session continuity in LAP replacement for 6G

Abstract

Low Altitude Platform (LAP) based aerial cells improve the performance of the cellular network dynamically. However, the small form factor of LAPs constraints the battery size, limiting its hovering time. LAPs should be replaced when the available power or available capacity goes below a threshold, in addition to reasons like a mechanical malfunction. Replacement requires data sessions from all the connected user equipment (UEs) to transfer from the old LAP to the new LAP. Classical schemes like (i) UE handover and (ii) carrier link management support UE mobility and load balancing. The classical schemes have higher latencies, which scales if there are many connected UEs, leading to increased data session interruption if applied in LAP replacement. The interruption leads to a degraded user experience during gaming and multimedia consumption. In this paper, to the best of our knowledge for the first time, we propose a novel Aerial Cell Cloning (ACC) protocol for network management applied during LAP replacement. Through call flow analysis and mathematical modeling backed with extensive system-level simulation, we show that the proposed ACC protocol reduces the session transfer latency by over 68% and brings down the LAP replacement time to a negligible value (99% reduction) when compared to existing classical schemes.

Keywords

• — aerial communication
• Handover
• Cloning
• Non-terrestrial network
• Network management