A novel handover scheme for multi-hop transparent relay network

Abstract

In multi-hop relay network, there may be several Relay Nodes(RNs) subordinated to the base station(BS) in a cell. When an user equipment (UE) moves from one cell to another, or an UE moves between two different RNs, a handover will happen. Since the coverage of a relay is small, the handover between two RNs or RN and base station (BS) maybe happen frequently. In terms of whether the UE is located at the same cell, the handover in relay network can be classified into two categories, intra MR-BS handover and inter MR-BS handover. In this paper, we proposed a new handover scheme exploiting uplink signal and downlink signal for intra MR-BS handover with transparent RN. In the scheme, the handover decision is divided into two steps. The first step is based on uplink quality, and the second step based on downlink quality to affirm the first decision. The simulation results show that the proposed handover scheme reduces the handover probability and outage probability compared to the current intra MR-BS handover with transparent RN.