Mobility Management for the Low‐Altitude Economy: Latency‐Aware Handover Design

ABSTRACT The low‐altitude economy (LAE) is emerging as a key enabler of intelligent transportation and automation through the large‐scale deployment of aerial vehicles (AVs) such as electric vertical take‐off and landing aircraft and logistics drones operating below 1 km altitude. Ensuring reliable connectivity for these high‐mobility nodes requires seamless integration of terrestrial and non‐terrestrial layers, where frequent handovers (HOs) across heterogeneous access points (APs) can lead to significant latency and service interruptions. This paper investigates latency‐aware mobility management for the LAE, focusing on minimizing HO frequency while maintaining quality‐of‐service constraints on data rate and HO latency. We formulate a mixed‐integer linear program to optimally determines per‐slot AV–AP associations under predicted coverage, rate, and HO latency parameters. To enable real‐time operation, we propose a greedy latency‐aware HO policy that approximates the MILP solution using local measurements and predicted HO latency information. Simulation results over a hybrid terrestrial–non‐terrestrial network (TN–NTN) scenario demonstrate that the proposed method achieves comparable link quality to the baselines while significantly reducing HO frequency and cumulative latency. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework ensures stable, low‐latency connectivity for LAE operations, establishing a practical foundation for future urban air mobility systems and 6G TN–NTN integration.