TITLE:
Candidate-Specific Uncertainty-Aware Predictive Handover for Dense Mobile Networks
AUTHORS:
Utham Kumar Anugula Sethupathy, Vijayanand Ananthanarayanan
KEYWORDS:
5G Mobility, Predictive Handover, Forecast Uncertainty, Quality of Service, Sensitivity Analysis
JOURNAL NAME:
Communications and Network,
Vol.18 No.4,
November
3,
2026
ABSTRACT: Predictive handover can react early to mobility but may become unstable when forecast errors differ across candidate cells. This study presents uncertainty-aware predictive handover (UAPHO), which estimates candidate-specific uncertainty from matured 0.5-s one-step forecast residuals while using a separate 1.5-s forecast for handover decisions. Twenty paired seeds were evaluated for three user densities, three speed ranges, eight policies, and five uncertainty coefficients, producing 1440 main and 100 sensitivity trials. At 80 users and 70 - 100 km/h, full UAPHO had a 1.08% handover-failure rate and 0.00% ping-pong rate, compared with 2.03% failure for the no-uncertainty predictive variant and 3.48% ping-pong without the return guard. Conventional A3 and load-aware A3 achieved lower failure rates of 0.04% and 0.00%, respectively, and tenth-percentile throughputs of 1.98 and 2.08 Mbit/s, versus 1.51 Mbit/s for full UAPHO. UAPHO therefore controls predictive instability but trades lower-tail throughput for stability in this synthetic corridor. Its value depends on uncertainty calibration and the selected guardrails.