A novel network mobility management scheme supporting seamless handover for high-speed trains

Automotive telematics has become an important technology for high-speed rail systems, which are being increasingly popular in this era of green technology. As the train speed increases, however, communications between the train and infrastructure encounter major difficulties of maintaining high quality communication. Handovers on high-speed trains occur more frequently and have shorter permissible handling times than for traditional vehicles. In this paper, the proposed 2MR network mobility scheme takes advantage of the physical size of high-speed trains to deploy two mobile routers (MRs) in the first and last carriages. This scheme provides a protocol to allow the two MRs to cooperate with a wireless network infrastructure in facilitating seamless handovers. Our simulation results demonstrate that compared to the traditional single MR schemes, the 2MR scheme noticeably improves the communication quality during handover by significantly reducing handover latency as well as packet loss for high-speed trains. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.