Abstract
When a vehicle moves from one base station (BS) to another, a large number of on-board user equipments (UE) may simultaneously and individually perform a handover (HO) procedure, resulting in increased HO overheads. A mobile relay node (MRN), connected via a wireless backhaul to a donor base station (DBS), is deployed on the rooftop of a bus to improve the link quality and reduce the associated HO overhead via group mobility. However, at moderate to high speeds, the on-board UEs can still suffer from frequent HOs due to the MRN failing to HO to a new DBS using the legacy downlink measurement-based HO (DL-HO) method. As a consequence, the connection towards all associated mobile users will be lost which poses tight reliability requirements on the backhaul link to avoid becoming a single point of failure (SPoF). In order to improve the reliability during group handover, in this work, we propose an uplink reference signal (UL RS) based HO procedure (coined as UL-HO) for the MRN which relies on the existing sounding reference signal in long term evolution (LTE) /new radio (NR). In the proposed scheme, and unlike the legacy DL-HO procedure in LTE/NR, the measurement report (MeasReport) transmission is not required between MRN and the DBS, therefore the HO delay can be reduced, decreasing the SPoF chances and thus, uninterrupted services can be provided to on-board UEs. We investigate the gain in terms of HO rate, HO failure rate, ping-pong rate and power consumption (both at the UE and the BS). Performance evaluations demonstrate that the proposed UL-HO scheme outperforms the legacy DL-HO scheme in current cellular networks.
Highlights
To meet the needs of high-speed wireless connections, long term evolution (LTE) employs smart antenna techniques, adaptive coding, fast channel-dependent scheduling and modulation, etc., to offer a high peak data rate in ideal conditions
SCOPE AND MAIN OBJECTIVES In this paper, we address the HO performance of 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) cellular networks (i.e. LTE/new radio (NR)) in the presence of a mobile relay node (MRN) and the associated power consumption in a scenario where a cluster of user equipments (UE) is traveling on a bus along a fixed-trajectory
We provide a solution to the problem of MRN HO failure (HOF) to a donor base station (DBS), to reduce the single point of failure (SPoF) cases and provide uninterrupted services for UEs on-board
Summary
To meet the needs of high-speed wireless connections, long term evolution (LTE) employs smart antenna techniques, adaptive coding, fast channel-dependent scheduling and modulation, etc., to offer a high peak data rate in ideal conditions. The challenges of providing cellular services to on-board passengers using dedicated macro eNBs with larger cell overlap include high Doppler shift, high penetration loss, high HOFs, serious signalling congestion, high UE power consumption and low spectral efficiency. A MRN provides a reduction in HOFs and signalling overheads using group HO procedure It has low cost over other solutions requiring dedicated BSs, and improved quality of service. In comparison to this work, our solution presents further benefits as it shows the benefits of group mobility, reduces the signalling overheads and the power consumption during MRN HO to DBS. SCOPE AND MAIN OBJECTIVES In this paper, we address the HO performance of 3GPP cellular networks (i.e. LTE/NR) in the presence of a MRN and the associated power consumption in a scenario where a cluster of UEs is traveling on a bus along a fixed-trajectory. The HO procedure in the architecture Alt 1 is more simplified and its latency analysis demonstrates better performance [19], which justifies our selection
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