Relay assisted soft handover in multihop cellular networks

This paper proposes a relay assisted soft handover in multihop cellular networks. In the relay assisted soft handover, a handover ranging is not required and an association process can be significantly simplified because it is unnecessary to change a serving node during handover process. In the proposed scheme, the handover latency and the service-interruption time caused by handover are reduced by 24% and 86%, respectively, while the capacity loss is only 5.33% compared to a hard handover in multihop cellular networks.