A Survey on High Mobility Wireless Communications: Challenges, Opportunities and Solutions

Providing reliable broadband wireless communications in high mobility environments, such as high-speed railway systems, remains one of the main challenges faced by the development of the next generation wireless systems. This paper provides a systematic review of high mobility communications. We first summarize a list of key challenges and opportunities in high mobility communication systems, then provide comprehensive reviews of techniques that can address these challenges and utilize the unique opportunities. The review covers a wide spectrum of communication operations, including the accurate modeling of high mobility channels, the transceiver structures that can exploit the properties of high mobility environments, the signal processing techniques that can harvest the benefits (e.g., Doppler diversity) and mitigate the impairments (e.g., carrier frequency offset, intercarrier interference, channel estimation errors) in high mobility systems, and the mobility management and network architectures that are designed specifically for high mobility systems. The survey focuses primarily on physical layer operations, which are affected the most by the mobile environment, with some additional discussions on higher layer operations, such as handover management and control-plane/user-plane decoupling, which are essential to high mobility operations. Future research directions on high mobility communications are summarized at the end of this paper.