Methods and apparatus to support control plane layer-1/layer-2 inter-cell beam management with mobility

A method for a source distributed unit (DU) of a base station in a wireless network, comprising:

• receiving, by the source DU of a first cell, a pre-configuration message from a central unit (CU) in the wireless network, wherein the pre-configuration message includes configuration for one or more candidate cells;
• sending a radio resource control (RRC) pre-configuration to a user equipment (UE) including configurations for the one or more candidate cells before a cell switch command;
• receiving a layer-1 (L1) measurement report for the one or more candidate cells from the UE;
• and
• sending the cell switch command to the UE carried in a MAC control element (CE) indicating a cell switch from the first cell to a second cell that belongs to the one or more candidate cells.

A user equipment (UE), comprising:

• a transceiver that transmits and receives radio frequency (RF) signal in a wireless network;
• a pre-configuration module that receives a pre-configuration message from a base station in a wireless network before a cell switch command, wherein the pre-configuration message includes configuration for one or more candidate cells, and wherein the UE is connected with a first cell;
• a layer-1 (L1) measurement module that performs L1 measurements for the one or more candidate cells based on the pre-configuration message;
• a L1 measurement report module that sends an L1 measurement report to the base station;
• a downlink(DL) sync module that performs a DL synchronization towards the one or more candidate cells;
• and
• an uplink (UL) time alignment module that performs an UL time alignment with the one or more candidate cell;
• and
• a cell switch module that receives the cell switch command carried in a MAC control element (CE) indicating to switch from the first cell to a second cell, wherein the second cell is one of the one or more candidate cells indicated in the pre-configuration message.