Applying a Dwell Time-Based 5G V2X Cell Selection Strategy in the City of Los Angeles, California

The fifth generation of wireless networks is expected to provide high capacity, low latency, high reliability, and massive connectivity services. Ultra-dense network (UDN) is a clear trend for enhancing capacity, coverage, and load balancing. In UDNs, the cell selection issue for moving vehicles should be addressed. In this paper, a cell selection strategy known as a dwell time estimation (DTE) scheme is proposed, which is based on Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications. It selects small cells that have the longest dwell time in a vehicle’s direction to decrease handover (HO) rate. The proposed DTE scheme is evaluated using two datasets, which are 5G small cells and vehicles datasets, that were collected in the city of Los Angeles in California. The simulation result shows that our DTE algorithm outperforms other recent related schemes in terms of the mean number of HOs by up to 36.26% because it prolongs the dwell time of the vehicle within the serving small cell. Consequently, it reduces the average number of HO failures and unnecessary HOs. In addition, it gives improvements in terms of the average achievable downlink throughput and network energy efficiency. Furthermore, it has superiority over the other schemes in terms of the mean packet delay by up to 16.49%.