A Novel Link-Network Assignment to Improve the Performance of Mobility Management Protocols in Future Mobile Networks

5G is expected to support new services and applications that will change the user experience and will drive to a new business landscape. Moreover, most of the services will require optimum connectivity and seamless mobility in heterogeneous networks. To cope with these challenges, network mobility management and network densification are envisioned to be key factors in the emerging 5G architectures. By deploying a large number of cells, 5G architectures can provide users with high throughput and flexible access services, an improvement of the network scalability and optimized network coverage. However, with this densification, seamless mobility support can lead to significant increasing in signaling overhead due to frequent handovers. In this context, network operators need to efficiently plan the deployment of the base stations taking into account the mobility management of the users, and the service degradation that this mobility process could cause. This article aims to optimize the assignment of the base stations to the access routers in the mobile network to improve the network performance. The results obtained show that our proposed Link-Network Assignment algorithm based on clustering techniques achieve significant gains in terms of signaling and data forwarding costs. These simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can successfully reduce signaling cost and packet delivery cost by up to 56% and 5%, respectively, on average, compared with baseline algorithms.