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When a vehicle moves from one base station (BS) to another, a large number of on-board user equipments (UE) may simultaneously and individually perform a handover (HO) procedure, resulting in increased HO overheads. A mobile relay node (MRN), connected via a wireless backhaul to a donor base station (DBS), is deployed on the rooftop of a bus to improve the link quality and reduce the associated HO overhead via group mobility. However, at moderate to high speeds, the on-board UEs can still suffer from frequent HOs due to the MRN failing to HO to a new DBS using the legacy downlink measurement-based HO (DL-HO) method. As a consequence, the connection towards all associated mobile users will be lost which poses tight reliability requirements on the backhaul link to avoid becoming a single point of failure (SPoF). In order to improve the reliability during group handover, in this work, we propose an uplink reference signal (UL RS) based HO procedure (coined as UL-HO) for the MRN which relies on the existing sounding reference signal in long term evolution (LTE) /new radio (NR). In the proposed scheme, and unlike the legacy DL-HO procedure in LTE/NR, the measurement report (MeasReport) transmission is not required between MRN and the DBS, therefore the HO delay can be reduced, decreasing the SPoF chances and thus, uninterrupted services can be provided to on-board UEs. We investigate the gain in terms of HO rate, HO failure rate, ping-pong rate and power consumption (both at the UE and the BS). Performance evaluations demonstrate that the proposed UL-HO scheme outperforms the legacy DL-HO scheme in current cellular networks.

Coping with the limited amount of available spectrum, time division duplexing (TDD) system is considered as an attractive duplexing method due to exploiting channel reciprocity as well as flexible resource management. The conventional scheduling scheme is based on the channel quality indicator (CQI) reported from the user equipment (UE) to estimate instantaneous data rates for the scheduling metric calculation. However, CQI is insufficient to reflect the state of the channel variation in terms of frequency and time. Based on the channel reciprocity of TDD systems, we utilize uplink sounding reference signal (SRS) to estimate downlink channel status. However the received SRS power is a result of uplink power control where power control effect should be compensated to estimate channel status in downlink scheduling. In order to solve this problem, we propose the SRS path loss estimation method based on the power headroom report. By using this scheme, the base station (BS) can obtain the compensated signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) and determine the scheduling metric based on its calculated SINR instead of reported CQI from UE. Simulation results show that the proposed scheduling algorithm outperforms the conventional scheme in total throughput, whereas the fairness index experienced by the proposed algorithm is lesser than of the conventional scheme based on CQI.