Flight plan and surveillance based handoff scheme in Aeronautical Passenger Communication

The existing handoff decision algorithms in MIP are mainly based on the reception of route advertisement or received signal strength (RSS). Those schemes will face some limitations in the Aeronautical Passenger Communication (APC) environment, including high handoff delay and may cause call drop. In this paper, a flight plan and surveillance based handoff decision algorithm is proposed to reduce the handoff delay caused by the high delay between the plane and its home network. The proposed algorithm use flight plan and surveillance information received by the Area Control Center (ACC) to calculate the real-time handoff probability to each base station (BS) the plane will go through and inform the BS to start pre-registration handoff if the probability is above a threshold. The simulation result shows that our handoff decision algorithm can reduce the handoff delay obviously in the APC environment.