Cooperative Handoff Management for Air-Ground HetNets via Poisson-Delaunay Tetrahedralization

Single-layer networks, whether ground base stations (GBSs) or aerial base stations (ABSs), struggle to provide mobile aerial user equipment (aUEs) with ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) and multi-access edge computing (MEC) services. These inherent limitations—coverage gaps, computational bottlenecks, and communication delays—are exacerbated by UAV mobility, necessitating effective cooperative handoff management in integrated air-ground heterogeneous networks (AGHetNets) to ensure service continuity and stringent QoS. To address this, we propose a novel Poisson-Delaunay tetrahedralization (PDT)-based AGHetNet architecture. This network employs four-node Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) sets (combining ABSs and GBSs) to provide URLLC and MEC for aUEs. Leveraging stochastic geometry, we design a cooperative handoff strategy for arbitrary aUE trajectories and derive an analytical expression for CoMP handoff probability. Furthermore, we propose a generalized framework for the aggregate interference power distribution incorporating NLoS probability, followed by characterizing the successful uplink communication probability and the successful edge computing probability based on handoff dynamics. Simulations demonstrate our model’s significant superiority over traditional Voronoi approaches, reducing handoff probability by 28% on average and enhancing both CoMP transmission and MEC performance. Crucially, our PPP-based handoff analysis provides a robust approximation for practical deployments, offering vital design parameters for future AGHetNets.