Estimation‐based cell search method for a mobile relay deployed on a moving network

Abstract

Mobile relay (MR) can be deployed in many scenarios for a promising solution to extend a capacity in moving networks. The cell search is important for the mobility management. The cell search of the MR may cause two problems. First, all the mobile stations (MSs) connected via the MR experience service interruption during the cell search of the MR. Second, the wireless resources allocated to the MR is wasted during the cell search of the MR. To solve these problems, we propose an estimation‐based cell search method (ECSM) for the MR. The ECSM exploits the signal quality information measured by the MSs to detect the neighbor base stations (BSs) and to estimate the signal quality between the detected neighbor BSs and the MR. We verified the performance of ECSM in terms of estimation error, cell detection probability, and network overhead. Unlike the conventional estimation method, the estimation error of ECSM rapidly converges and attains to less than 1 dB when the number of measurements is 4. The ECSM can improve the cell detection probability at the expense of a relatively small amount of the signaling overhead. Therefore, the proposed method can be applied to a next‐generation relay‐enhanced cellular network. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.