Ahmet Faruk Baldiz completed his Master’s degree in ICT and Internet Engineering at Università di Roma Tor Vergata with his thesis on “Analysis and Development of Intersegment Handover Mechanisms for 5G Private Networks”, with the support from RomARS.
This thesis investigates a service-aware handover mechanism for heterogeneous 5G and non-3GPP networks, with a specific focus on Wi-Fi offloading in environments where the UE has no control over the 5G infrastructure. The objective is to design, implement, and experimentally evaluate a UE-side decision framework capable of selecting the most suitable access path based on real-time performance measurements.
The proposed system is built around an Android-based Non-3GPP Access Emulator. Unlike traditional handover methods that rely on a single radio parameter (e.g., RSRP), the developed algorithm combines radio layer and transport-layer indicators including RSRP, SINR, RSSI, latency, jitter, throughput, and loss into a unified scoring model. The design also incorporates stability mechanisms such as hysteresis, time to trigger, and dwell-time, ensuring robust behavior under fluctuating wireless conditions. A full emulation of 3GPP ATSSS is not possible without network-side.
Therefore, this work implements only the UE side measurement and decision components, while the actual switching is performed through Android’s network binding. The system reproduces the functional behavior of traffic steering at the device. Experiments were carried out using real indoor mobility scenarios, each repeated with four service profiles gaming, web browsing, video streaming, and URLLC-like traffic.
Overall, this thesis provides a practical and extensible framework for studying UE-side access selection in heterogeneous 5G environments and shows how service-aware logic can complement private or enterprise network deployments requiring stable and application-dependent connectivity.