A Communication System with a Fast Handover under a High Speed Mobile Environment

This paper proposes a communication system using Wi-Fi (IEEE802.11g) to link between the Internet and high speed rail systems traveling at around 300km/h. In order to adapt Wi-Fi for high speed mobile communication, we optimized its coverage on a rail track with a developed directional antenna, which has a communication range of around 500m by 10mW. With the antenna, however, a mobile entity had to switch over antennae (a layer 2 handover (L2HO)) every 6 to 7 seconds. Furthermore Mobile IP handovers (a layer 3 handover (L3HO)) had to be appropriately controlled to avoid a simultaneous handover of Layer 2 and 3, which results in a fatal communication disruption. Therefore the designed system in this paper separated a L3HO from a L2HO. As a result, a maximum of 25Mbps with an average of 16Mbps for the UDP throughput and an average L2HO time of 110ms were realized while travelling at 270km/h.