Wireless communication device and method for network controlled beam based handover in NR

A wireless communication device that performs handover from a source cell to a target cell in a wireless communication system, the wireless communication device comprising:

• at least one transmitter and at least one receiver;
• and
• circuitry associated with the at least one transmitter and the at least one receiver, the circuitry operable to:
• perform a beam tracking procedure for one or more neighbor cells to provide, for each neighbor cell, a list of tracked beams for the neighbor cell;
• receive a handover command from a source radio access node that instructs the wireless communication device to perform a handover from a source cell served by the source radio access node to a target cell served by a target radio access node, wherein the target cell is one of the one or more neighbor cells for which the beam tracking procedure is performed;
• select a beam of the target cell from the list of tracked beams for the target cell based on random access resource configuration and/or a quality threshold;
• and
• perform random access on the selected beam;
• wherein selecting the beam of the target cell from the list of tracked beams for the target cell comprises the circuitry being further operable to:
• determine that there are no dedicated random access channel resources allocated for contention-free random access for the best beam in the list of tracked beams for the target cell;
• and
• upon determining that there are no dedicated random access channel resources allocated for contention-free random access for the best beam in the list of tracked beams for the target cell:
• determine a difference between a quality of the best beam in the list of tracked beams for the target cell and a quality of a k-th best beam in the list of tracked beams for the target cell, the k-th best beam being a beam for which dedicated random access channel resources are allocated;
• and
• determine whether the difference is less than a threshold, where the selected beam of the target cell is the k-th best beam if the difference is less than the threshold.