A Relay-assisted Secure Handover Mechanism for High-speed Trains

Considering that the existing Long Term Evolution is not suitable for the fast and frequent handovers of high-speed trains, this paper proposes a relay-assisted handover mechanism to solve the problems of long handover authentication time and vulnerable to security attacks. It can achieve mutual authentication for train-ground wireless communication, and data transmission is consistent with one-time pad at the same time. The security analysis, efficiency analysis and simulation results show that the proposed mechanism not only realizes the forward security and resists many common attacks, but also effectively reduces the computational overhead of train antenna during the secure handover process. When the running speed of a train is lower than 500km/h, the handover delay is generally lower than 50ms and the handover outage probability is less than 1.8%. When the running speed of a train is 350km/h, the throughput is higher than 16.4mbps in the process of handover. Therefore, the secure handover mechanism can improve the handover performance of high-speed trains.