Performance Analysis of 5G Mobile Relay Systems for High-Speed Trains

Abstract

To provide high data rate for high-speed trains (HSTs), it is required to use emerging wireless communication systems, such as the fifth generation (5G). An asymmetric 5G mobile relay system is investigated for HSTs, where the mobile relay is deployed at the HST to avoid high penetration loss of the direct link between the base station (BS) and the users (UE) inside carriages. The sub-6GHz frequency is utilized for the BS-relay link while the relay-UE link adopts the millimeter wave frequency. Therefore, the BS-relay link experiences κ - μ fading and the relay-UE link experiences static fluctuating two-ray fading. Moreover, the channel aging effect is considered due to the mobility of HST. For the considered system, we first study the exact statistical characterizations of the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratios. Then, we derive exact closed-form expressions for key performance metrics, such as outage probability, average bit-error rate, and average achievable rate per unit bandwidth. The significant effects of channel aging, system and channel parameters on the mobile relay system are revealed from theoretical analysis and are further illustrated by simulation results. Our investigation reveals that the mobile relay system is a promising network architecture for HST communications and can provide steady and high-speed data provisioning to HST passengers against the significant bottleneck of channel aging.