A soft handover algorithm for TD-LTE system in high-speed railway scenario

A soft handover algorithm is presented for TD-LTE system in the high-speed railway specialized network. In this scenario, good performance of signal quality and handover frequency cannot be supported by hard handover simultaneously due to the fast vehicle speed. As the high-speed railway network is specialized, it can be reasonably assumed that the frequency resources are sufficient and the complexity of soft handover implementation is much lower than that in the normal cellular networks. Thus, the soft handover algorithm can be applied in this specialized scenario. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm keeps a stable signal quality and decreases the number of handover at the same time. The soft handover has a much better performance comparing with hard handover at the expense of a little higher implementation complexity.