USR PUBLISHER

Reliable handover is central to service continuity in dense fifth-generation cellular networks, where short cell residence times, overlapping coverage, and rapid channel variation increase mobility-management stress. This study presents a scenario-level simulation assessment of handover latency, handover success rate, and packet loss under a Lagos-motivated urban deployment context. A 2 × 3 × 3 factorial structure combined two mobility classes, three network-density levels, and three handover strategies, producing 18 scenario cells. The analytical configuration represented 5,000 virtual user equipment devices, 50 macro cells, 150 small cells, and ten repeated runs per broad simulation condition. Hard handover, a make-before-break soft-handover abstraction, and predictive handover were compared with descriptive statistics and an additive factorial analysis of variance. Network density produced the strongest performance change. Mean latency increased from 54.43 ms at low density to 70.47 ms at high density, mean success rate decreased from 94.32% to 82.12%, and packet loss increased from 1.37% to 5.57%. Vehicular mobility increased mean latency by 2.83 ms and packet loss by 1.05 percentage points relative to pedestrian mobility, while success rate decreased by 2.58 percentage points. Predictive handover recorded the most favorable overall means, with 61.59 ms latency, 88.40% success, and 3.22% packet loss, although the algorithm main effect was not statistically significant after density and mobility were controlled. The results show that density-aware cell planning and mobility-sensitive parameter adaptation are more influential than selecting one fixed handover method. Predictive and adaptive strategies should therefore operate within a context-responsive policy that adjusts hysteresis, time-to-trigger, and target-cell preparation to local density and movement conditions.