Rural Handover Parameter Tuning to Achieve End to End Latency Requirements of Future Railway Mobile Communication Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates how handover parameter tuning in future railway mobile systems can meet low latency and high reliability requirements, emphasizing the importance of mobility optimization for 5G-based railway communications.

Contribution

It analyzes the impact of handover procedures and parameter configurations on latency and reliability in FRMCS, highlighting the need for mobility performance optimization.

Findings

Baseline handover meets standard data communication requirements.

Optimizing handover parameters can reduce latency by up to 18.5%.

Mobility performance significantly influences packet latency and reliability.

Abstract

GSM-R (GSM for Railways) is a 2G-based standardized ground-to-train communications system that enabled interoperability across different countries. However, as a 2G-based system, it is nearing its lifetime and therefore, it will be replaced with 5G-based Future Railway Mobile Communications System (FRMCS). FRMCS is expected to bring in new use cases that demand low latency and high reliability. However, from a mobility perspective, it is not clear how the low latency and high reliability will be achieved. This paper investigates the effect of handover procedure on latency and reliability and analyzes which use cases of FRMCS can be satisfied using baseline handover. We also sweep through different handover parameter configurations and analyze their effect on mobility performance. Then, we analyze the effect of mobility performance on packet latency and reliability. Our results show that, with baseline handover, Standard Data Communications Scenario is met and optimizing for baseline handover performance can reduce latency by up to 18.5%, indicating that optimizing for mobility performance is crucial in FRMCS.