  Handover (HO) management is one of the most crucial tasks in dense cellular
networks with mobile users. A problem in the HO management is to deal with
increasing HOs due to network densification in the 5G evolution and various HO
skipping techniques have so far been studied in the literature to suppress
excessive HOs. In this paper, we propose yet another HO skipping scheme, called
periodic HO skipping. The proposed scheme prohibits the HOs of a mobile user
equipment (UE) for a certain period of time, referred to as skipping period,
thereby enabling flexible operation of the HO skipping by adjusting the length
of the skipping period. We investigate the performance of the proposed scheme
on the basis of stochastic geometry. Specifically, we derive analytical
expressions of two performance metrics -- the HO rate and the expected downlink
data rate -- when a UE adopts the periodic HO skipping. Numerical results based
on the analysis demonstrate that the periodic HO skipping scenario can
outperform the scenario without any HO skipping in terms of a certain utility
metric representing the trade-off between the HO rate and the expected downlink
data rate, in particular when the UE moves fast. Furthermore, we numerically
show that there can exist an optimal length of the skipping period, which
locally maximizes the utility metric, and approximately provide the optimal
skipping period in a simple form. Numerical comparison with some other HO
skipping techniques is also conducted.
