Handover based on maximum cell residence time and adaptive TTT for LTE-R high-speed railways

With the development of high-speed railway technologies, train velocities can now reach speeds up to 350 km/h, and higher in the future. In high-speed railway systems (HSRs), loss of communication can result in serious accidents, especially when the train is controlled through wireless communications. For to this reason, operators of Long Term Evolution for Railway (LTE-R) communication systems install eNodeBs (eNBs) with high density to achieve highly reliable communications. However, densely located eNBs can result in unnecessary frequent handovers (HOs) resulting in instability because, during every HO process, there is a period of time in which the communication link is disconnected. To solve this problem, in this paper, an HO scheme based on the maximum cell residence time (CRT) and adaptive time to trigger (aTTT), which are collectively called CaT, is proposed to reduce unnecessary HOs (using CRT estimations) and decrease HO failures by improving the handover command transmission point (HCTP) in LTE-R HSR communications.