Handoff Performance Improvements in an Integrated Train-Ground Communication System Based on Wireless Network Virtualization

In existing urban rail transit systems, the train-ground communication system for different subsystems is deployed independently. Investing and constructing the communication infrastructures repeatedly not only wastes substantial social resources, but it also is difficult to maintain all these infrastructures. In this paper, we propose an integrated trainground communication system based on wireless network virtualization for urban rail transit systems. In order to improve the communication-based train control (CBTC) subsystem performance during handoff, we propose a novel handoff scheme to support handoff between virtual networks. The application-layer quality-of-service (QoS) parameters of the CBTC, passenger information system, and closed circuit television subsystems are used as the performance measures in the handoff design. We then formulate the QoS optimization problem in the proposed integrated train-ground communication system as an approximate dynamic programming (ADP) problem. The extensive simulation results show that the proposed integrated train-ground communication system QoS can be improved substantially with our ADP-based optimization model.