  Network densification is found to be a potential solution to meet 5G capacity
standards. Network densification offers more capacity by shrinking base
stations' (BSs) footprints, thus reduces the number of users served by each BS.
However, the gains in the capacity are achieved at the expense of increased
handover (HO) rates. Hence, HO rate is a key performance limiting factor that
should be carefully considered in densification planning. This paper sheds
light on the HO problem that appears in dense 5G networks and proposes an
effective solution via topology aware HO skipping. Different skipping
techniques are considered and compared with the conventional best connected
scheme. To this end, the effectiveness of the proposed schemes is validated by
studying the average user rate in the downlink single-tier and two-tier
cellular networks, which are modeled using Poisson point process and Poisson
cluster process, respectively. The proposed skipping schemes show up to 47%
gains in the average throughput that would maximize the benefit of network
densification.
