Mobile Relay Handover Procedure in Train for 4G LTE-Advanced Network

Abstract

High speed train has been the most prominent transportation that been used by the public to save the travel time due to the road congestion especially during the peak hour. In parallel with the development of high speed trains nowadays as the trains’ speed can reach up to 350km/h, there have been extensive researches to improve the data rates for mobile wireless communication. Higher data rate and reliable mobile communication are desirable when moving in high speed train. These are a challenge when moving in high speed mobile environment. The major concern is the handover process when travelling from one cell to the other is unable to complete successfully. This is due to the time delay allocates for the handover process to take place is lesser than the time taken for the train to travel across a cell area. Therefore, a solution is solution is required to maintain continuity of services for the passengers on board in order to avoid simultaneous call drop. LTE-Advanced technology seems to be a convincing platform to overcome the problem by proposing better handover signaling procedure when adapting mobile relay on top of the train. A mathematical equation has been derived in order to compare the differences of signaling cost of 3G and 4G networks. The proposed signaling solution is then used in simulation to analyze the number of handover calls between conventional and proposed scheme. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme has better performance in number of handover calls. Thus by adapting relay node in LTE-Advanced network, the problem of drop call can be reduced.