Beamforming and positioning-assisted handover scheme for long-term evolution system in high-speed railway

As the railway industry expands and trains speed-up, the reliability and efficiency of wireless communication systems in high-speed railway have to face the severe challenges. The high-speed brings about more severe Doppler effect, the postponement of handover triggering location and more frequent handover. Therefore the influence caused by the high-speed decreases the reliability of wireless communication network. In this study, considering the decision of `global system for mobile communication for railway` evolution to long-term evolution for railway (LTE-R) by International Union of Railways, a scheme based on the beamforming and positioning information is proposed to improve the system handover performance for the LTE system which is being applied to the high-speed railway. In the overlapping region, both the current serving eNodeB and the target eNodeB start to use beamforming with different gain factors to improve handover success probability. The results have shown that the proposed scheme increases the handover success probability effectively.