Service Provisioning and User Association for Heterogeneous Wireless Railway Networks

In addition to comforting passengers' journey, the modern railway system is responsible to support a variety of on-board Internet services to meet the passenger's demands on seamless service provisioning. In order to provide wireless access to the train, one idea attracting increasing attention is to deploy a series of track-side access points (TAPs) with high-speed data rates along the rail lines dedicated to the broadband mobile service provisioning on board. Due to the heavy data traffic flushing into the base stations (BSs) of the cellular networks, TAPs act as a complement to the BSs in data delivery. In this paper, we focus on the TAP association problem for service provisioning in a heterogeneous wireless railway network, where the TAP and BS coexist by applying a queueing game theoretic approach. Specifically, we present comprehensive theoretical analysis of the delay performance on the circumstances of partially observed, totally unobserved, and totally observed state of the system. Moreover, based on the considered payoff model and the derived association delay time, the passenger's equilibrium strategies on association behaviors, i.e., whether to associate with a TAP or not, are studied. Finally, performance evaluations and discussions are provided to illustrate our proposed passenger-TAP association scheme for the heterogeneous wireless railway communication system.