Handover based on receive beamforming in high mobility cellular communication networks

Abstract

This paper provides a new approach to solve the handover problem in high mobility cellular communication networks. In particular, the mobile node, e.g, the high-speed train(HST), is equipped with multiple antennas by which it finds the target base station (BS) quickly with only receive beamforming. When only imperfect channel state information (CSI) is available, the output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the receive beamformer will be interfered by signals from different nearby BSs, which may lead to possible error in the selection of target BS. To deal with this, two methods, i.e., maximum-ratio combining (MRC) and Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE), are proposed to obtain the optimal beamforming vectors. Simulation results show that both the proposed methods perform well, and the MMSE approach has good robustness.