A UE-Initiated Handover Mechanism for Avoiding Disturbance on Extended Reality (XR) Services in 5G Networks

Traditional handover mechanisms rely heavily on continuous user equipment (UE) measurements and frequent reporting to centralized gNBs. This approach introduces significant signaling overhead and latency, rendering it inadequate for latency-sensitive applications, such as extended reality (XR). This paper proposes a novel handover process that leverages geofencing and UE-based decision-making to improve handover performance. By introducing a geofencing approach, the UE remains in a measurement-free state within predefined regions, activating signal measurements only when exiting the geofence region. The UE independently evaluates the serving and neighbor gNBs and initiates a reverse handover request to the serving gNB, eliminating the need for periodic measurement reporting. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism significantly reduces the number of measurements and signaling overhead, thereby improving scalability and resource efficiency.