Context-Aware Handover Optimization for Relay-Aided Vehicular Terminals

The handover (HO) performance of a user in wireless cellular networks depends on HO parameters and context such as user position and velocity. We propose a novel HO optimization approach for high-mobility users aided by vehicle-mounted relay. By exploiting the learned or predicted context information obtained at the relay, we derive closed-form expressions of outage probabilities related to the events of too-early and too-late HO. We show that a good trade-off between minimization of HO-related radio link failures and reduction of unnecessary HOs can be achieved by minimizing the weighted sum of the above mentioned outage probabilities. The proposed algorithm, evaluated by numerical simulations, turns out to outperform conventional HO optimization strategies for a wide range of user velocities.