A Novel Seamless Handover Scheme for High-Speed Railway Transport using Dual-Antenna System

Abstract

Nowadays we are witnessing the advent of high speed trains including bullet trains running at the speed of 300–500 kmph. Provisioning of the interrupted communication services to the passengers in such vehicular environment is indeed a challenge. Mobile cellular networks offer one of the potential technologies for making the provisioning of the uninterrupted communication services in fast speed trains. Recent cellular networks are based on smaller cells, which result in frequent cell boundary crossings and hence high handover rate. In this paper, we present an improved handover scheme suitable for high speed railway transport. It may be used for long length vehicles offering seamless communication services to the users. The design parameters include handover processing delay, dual-antennae structure to provide seamless communication, bi-casting mechanism to eliminate data forwarding delay and mobile relay link to reduce overhead on dedicated base station. Comparative analysis with the traditional schemes shows the superior performance of the proposed handover scheme.