Vehicle mobility pattern-based handover scheme using discrete-time Markov chain

For the improvement of the quality of service (QoS) of wireless Internet users traveling in vehicles, it is effective to reduce the service disruption time by avoiding unnecessary handover occurrence, considering the vehicles’ movement paths. This paper proposes a handover scheme suitable for users traveling in vehicles, which enables continuous learning of the handover process using a discrete-time Markov chain (DTMC). The proposed handover scheme avoids unnecessary handover trials when a short dwell time in a target cell is expected or when the target cell is an intermediate cell through which the vehicle quickly passes. For verifying the performance of the proposed scheme, we observe the average number of handover trials and the average throughput along various paths, which are real bus lines. The results show that the proposed scheme reduces the number of handover occurrences and maintains adequate throughput.