A novel handover scheme with relay technique in GSM-R network

GSM-R (GSM for Railway) network is a professional cellular network which is used for railway transportation. Unlike mobiles with low speed in regular GSM network, in GSM-R network the signals received by mobiles on high speed trains may suffer severe Doppler shift and other interferences. Therefore, measurement of these tainted signals may cause wrong handover decisions, leading to lower probability of successful handover, hence the safety and reliability of GSM-R network are reduced significantly. In this paper, a novel handover scheme with relay technique in GSM-R network is proposed, which involves measurement of signals from relay stations in handover process. Numerical results show that the outage rate of handover using this new scheme is obviously smaller than that without relay stations, thus higher probability of successful handover is achieved.