Blockchain‐enabled handover skipping for high mobility train passengers

Abstract

Due to the cell size decrements and limited sojourn time on a high speed train mobility, unnecessary handovers (HOs) occur, which can lead to higher network communication costs, and affect passengers quality of service (QoS). This paper proposes a novel blockchain-enabled privacy preserving HO skipping framework by using train mobility dataset from the city of London. Using a complex dataset parameters, passenger traffic flows are modelled by averaging various train lines and station's footfall numbers utilising blockchain to maintain privacy. The framework stores pseudonym addresses in order to track the path of users. The proposed framework allows for a better trade-off in terms of 2% (approx.) gain in average throughput, over 100% gain in the last-hop signal quality, and a 50% reduction in HO costs, while also addressing the needs for resources to operate the blockchain.