A CoMP soft handover scheme for LTE systems in high speed railway

With the development of high-speed railway and public growing demand on data traffic, people pay much more attention to provide high data rate and high reliable services under high mobility circumstance. Due to the higher data rate and lower system latency, long-term evolution (LTE) has been chosen as the next generation’s evolution of railway mobile communication system by the International Union of Railways. However, there are still many problems to be solved in the high mobility applications of LTE, especially the higher handover failure probability, which seriously degrades the reliability of railway communication. This article proposes an optimized handover scheme, in which the coordinated multiple point transmission technology and dual vehicle station coordination mechanism are applied to improve the traditional hard handover performance of LTE. The scheme enables the high speed train to receive signals from both adjacent base stations and obtain diversity gain when it moves through the overlapping areas, so it improves the quality of the received signal and provides reliable communication between train and ground eNodeBs. Numerical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed scheme can decrease the outage probability remarkably during handover and guarantee the reliability of train to ground communication.