Remote Antenna Unit Selection Assisted Seamless Handover for High-Speed Railway Communications with Distributed Antennas

To attain seamless handover and reduce the handover failure probability for high-speed railway (HSR) communication systems, this paper proposes a remote antenna unit (RAU) selection assisted handover scheme where two antennas are installed on high speed train (HST) and distributed antenna system (DAS) cell architecture on ground is adopted. The RAU selection is used to provide high quality received signals for trains moving in DAS cells and the two HST antennas are employed on trains to realize seamless handover. Moreover, to efficiently evaluate the system performance, a new metric termed as handover occurrence probability is defined for describing the relation between handover occurrence position and handover failure probability. We then analyze the received signal strength, the handover trigger probability, the handover occurrence probability, the handover failure probability and the communication interruption probability. Numerical results are provided to compare our proposed scheme with the current existing ones. It is shown that our proposed scheme achieves better performances in terms of handover failure probability and communication interruption probability.