Fast Handover for High-Speed Railway via NDN

Handover is crucial for quality of communication service in high-speed railway. With the speed increases, the handover becomes more frequent in high-speed railway. However, the hard handover of GSM-R will break down the communication service for a short time. To reduce the handover latency, we propose the Fast Handover Mechanism (FHM) in Named Data Networking-Railway (NDN-R). Named Date Networking (NDN) is content oriented, FHM does not need to establish an end-to-end connection after the handover occurs. Therefore, FHM can fast handover to the next-hop node without interrupt the communication service. In addition, the FHM can avoid the ping-pong handover which further improves the quality of communication. Simulation results show that the FHM can reduce about 72% of the handover latency compared to the traditional handover mechanism. The packet loss rate, average delay can be reduced and the throughput can be improved.