Foundation Model-Based Mobility Management for 6G Mobile Networks

Abstract

Mobility management associating all user equipments (UEs) to proper base stations (BSs) [also known as handover (HO)] to achieve the designated performance optimization is one of the most crucial functions in mobile networks. Although effective mobility management has received considerable research attentions, existing schemes follow event-driving operations, in which HO decisions are made based on events of performance degradation that BSs/UEs passively suffer from or proactively foresee. However, the performance and decisions of these schemes are highly subject to the identified events, to lose generalization and better performance under unidentified events. To address this issue, we propose a foundation model (FM)-based mobility management for the sixth-generation (6G) mobile networks inherently supporting artificial intelligence (AI) computing, in which the FM generates the HO decisions for all UEs to maximize the overall throughput under the constraints of ping-pong rate and HO failure (HOF) rate by implicitly taking moving trajectories, traffic demands, channel conditions of all UEs, and available resources of BSs into account. To this end, a hierarchical model structure composed of long short-term memory (LSTM) networks with multihead attention (MHA) is adopted, which is trained by emulated datasets with augmentation. The performance evaluation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art schemes in terms of the average throughput over all UEs while satisfying the required ping-pong rate and HOF rate, and justify the robustness of the proposed FM under different network deployment scenarios.