On the Impact of Handovers on Packet Reliability in Mobile Networks

5G makes it possible to reach to very low latency and very high reliability for different use cases. However, it is not clear how mobility procedures would impact the latency and the reliability of these use cases. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate how a packet flows through 5G RAN Protocol Stack and precisely how handovers affect that flow. Later, we present simulation studies conducted under three different scenarios, Future Railway Mobile Communications System Scenario (a high speed train use case that requires very high reliability), a highway scenario for C-V2X communications and an FR2 Urban Scenario for XR use cases. Our findings indicate that optimizing for handover interruption time can improve reliability up to 0.0094% in the FRMCS scenario, up to 0.045% in the Highway scenario, and up to 0.0071% in the FR2 scenario, underlining the importance of mobility procedures for use cases that require very high reliability, up to 99.9999%.