The Effect of Power Adjustment on Handover in High-Speed Railway Communication Networks

In future 5G communication systems, supporting high-quality wireless communications in high-mobility scenarios becomes very essential. Although many existing works indicate that increasing transmit power is able to reduce the handover failure probability (referred to as the power greedy scheme) through improving the radio condition or received signal strength, it goes against the requirement of green system design. In this paper, we investigate the effect of power adjustment on handover performance from the perspective of reducing the “uncertainty” in handover procedure in high-speed railway communications systems by embedding it into the existing handover procedure. It is shown that, with power adjustment, the handover performance can be improved without increasing extra energy consumption. The power adjustment-assisted handover scheme is applied to a high-speed railway scenario with distributed antenna system (DAS) cells. Both the blanket transmission-based handover scheme and the remote antenna unit selection transmission-based handover scheme are discussed for DAS cells. To evaluate the performance, the handover probability, handover failure probability, and communication interruption probability associated with two handover schemes are analyzed. Moreover, two new performance metrics, named handover occurrence probability and handover failure occurrence probability, are defined to efficiently evaluate the handover performance versus the position of the train. Both the analytical and the numerical results show that introducing power adjustment into handover gives ability to achieve a better performance compared with the current existing ones. Moreover, the power adjustment-assisted handover scheme is capable of achieving the similar system performance to existing power greedy scheme but without increasing energy consumption.