Handover schemes and algorithms of high-speed mobile environment: A survey

With lower energy consumption, less environmental pollution, larger capacity, and higher safety, the high-speed railway is playing an important role in mass transportations. The development of high-speed railways makes people’s life more and more convenient. Meanwhile, it puts forward much higher demands on high-speed railway communications. Therefore, new solutions are desired to keep up with this unprecedented growth. However, communications in high-speed environment have particular characteristics such as fast and frequent handover, high penetration loss, and high Doppler frequency shift. Current researches mainly focus on providing broadband wireless network access for high-speed mobile terminals. This article presents an overview of the latest technical developments on handover schemes and handover algorithms targeting high-speed mobile scenarios. In addition, this paper suggests the most appropriate techniques which can efficiently communicate in high-speed mobile scenarios. Finally, we discuss future trends of handover researches in high-speed mobile environments.