Seamless dual-link handover scheme in broadband wireless communication systems for high-speed rail

Due to frequent handovers in broadband wireless communications in high-speed rail, communication interruption during handover could seriously degrade the experiences of passengers on the train. Aiming to reduce the interruption time, this paper proposes a seamless handover scheme based on a dual-layer and dual-link system architecture, where a Train Relay Station is employed to execute handover for all users in a train and two antennas are mounted at the front and rear of a train. In the proposed scheme, the front antenna executes handover while the rear antenna is still communicating with BS, so that the communication can keep non-interruptive throughout the handover. Moreover, bi-casting is adopted to eliminate the data forwarding delay between the serving BS and target BS. A complete handover protocol is designed and the performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed. It can be seen from analytical results that the handover failure probability decreases as cell overlap increases and the communication interruption probability decreases with the decrease of train handover location and the increase of cell overlap. The simulation results show that in the proposed scheme, the communication interruption probability is smaller than 1% when the handover location is properly selected and the system throughput is not affected by handover. In conclusion, both theoretical and simulation results show that the proposed scheme can efficiently perform seamless handover for high-speed rail with low implementation overhead.