New Passenger Services in Railway Stations Based on Mode Group Diversity Multiplexing Optical Fiber Communications

Abstract

Nowadays, because of its wide bandwidth and high communication capability, the optical fiber is more and more used for high data rate transmission of information in railway environments. Conventionally, only one service is sent over the fiber at a time. However, many different services can be simultaneously conveyed in railway stations such as passenger information service, cellular phone, Wi-Fi… The objective of the work proposed in this paper is to demonstrate the potential benefits of transmitting radio signals over fiber in a railway environment. The main idea is to exploit the full capacity of the fiber by transmitting multiple services using the same fiber. Since, different services are operating in different frequency bands; we propose a new multiplexing technique called Mode Group Diversity Multiplexing (MGDM) to ensure the transmission of multiple services using the same fiber, without additional infrastructure. There are numerous advantages of the proposed technique, e.g., faster and reliable data exchange, high resolution video surveillance capability, high data rate information exchange in railway stations. We present, in this paper, the physical characteristics of optical fibers, performance of MGDM multiplexing technique, and the influence of the laser excitation conditions at the entrance of the fiber on the performances of the system.