An Effective Handover Scheme Based on Antenna Selection in Ground–Train Distributed Antenna Systems

Due to frequent handovers in broadband wireless communications for the high-speed railway system, communication interruption caused by handover failures could seriously degrade the users´ experience. Aiming at reducing the handover failure probability, this paper proposes an effective handover scheme based on the distributed antenna system (DAS) and mobile-relay-aided two-link architecture, i.e., ground-relay link and relay-onboard link, where the mobile relay is mounted on top of the moving train. In addition, an antenna selection scheme with optimal power allocation is proposed to improve handover performance. Our simulation and analysis results show that the DAS structure with macrodiversity can reduce the unnecessary handovers, as well as reduce the handover failure and link outage probabilities compared with the traditional cell without DAS. In addition, the proposed DAS with an antenna selection scheme performs better in terms of handover failure and link outage probabilities than that of DAS with a equal power allocation (EPA) scheme.