Provisioning commercial mobile telecommunications service on a high-speed train (HST) faces several challenges. In particular, when an HST quickly passes through the radio coverage of the base stations, frequent handovers may result in serious communication interruption. Methods such as the hierarchical two-hop network and the seamless dual-link handover scheme were proposed to address these challenges. This paper proposes the multiple radio access technology (multi-RAT) to resolve the HST handover issue, which allows the HST to simultaneously connect to two or more heterogeneous mobile networks (e.g., the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System and Long Term Evolution). With this approach, the handover process can be improved by keeping multiple heterogeneous network links of the HST at the same time and maintaining the connection through one link during the handover process of the other link. We show that multi-RAT can effectively enhance HST communications by reducing the impact of handover failure. This approach can work together with other solutions such as the dual-link scheme to further enhance the performance of the HST communications.Index Terms-Handover, hierarchical two-hop (HTH) network, highspeed train (HST), multiple radio access technology (multi-RAT).
The mobile traffic has grown rapidly with the popularity of smart mobile devices. To accommodate increasing traffic, heterogeneous network integration is considered as a viable solution. By overlapping the coverage of heterogeneous networks (e.g., the long-term evolution (LTE) and Wi-Fi integrated network), the mobile operators can use the offloading service (e.g., Wi-Fi offloading) to reduce network congestion. In this approach, a proper network coordination mechanism is required for load balancing of the LTE and Wi-Fi integrated network. In this paper, we use access network discovery and selection function (ANDSF) to suggest selection of proper base stations (e.g., LTE evolved Node Bs or Wi-Fi access points) to user equipment (UE) for load balancing. We integrate the ANDSF with software-defined networking (SDN) to make the ANDSF-aided network more programmable, flexible, and dynamically manageable. Moreover, we propose a power-saving ANDSF (PSA) algorithm to appropriately assign network resource to UEs and reduce the power consumption of Wi-Fi access points (APs). We have implemented the SDN-based PSA and measured the delay times. We also conduct simulation experiments to show that the successful probability of UEs' resource requests to PSA is almost the same as the proposed schemes of the previous studies when the network traffic is unbalanced. Our study indicates that for unbalanced traffic, PSA can reduce 15.63 % more power consumption of Wi-Fi AP than the previous approaches.
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