Abstract
Railway applications are in continuous evolution with the aim of offering a more efficient, sustainable, and safer transportation system for the users. Generally, these applications are constantly exchanging information between the systems onboard the train and the trackside through a wireless communication. Nowadays, Global System for Mobile communications-Railway (GSM-R) is the technology used by European Train Control System (ETCS), but it is becoming obsolete. Therefore, alternatives for this technology have to be found for the different railway applications. Its natural evolution is to move forward with the latest technology deployed: Long-Term Evolution (LTE), which the Public Land Mobile Networks (PLMN) have already deployed. Therefore, testing the performance of this communication technology in the railway environment could be useful to assess its suitability and reduce the cost of railway network dedicated deployment. In order to do that, a methodology to characterize the communication environment is proposed. The main goal is to measure geolocated impairments of any communication channel in a railway environment being able to determine its behavior of the different communication technologies and find out possible coverage issues. Moreover, it could help in the selection of suitable communication technology for railway. This paper presents a brief description of the communication for railways and its QoS parameters for performance measuring. Afterward, the testing methodology is described, and then, the communication channel measurement campaign on a real track in Spain where the railway environment is variable is presented (tunnels, rural/urban area…). Finally, the measurements and results on this real track in Spain are shown. The results provide suitability of the 4G technologies based on the delay requirements for the implementation of ETCS over it.
Highlights
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Global System for Mobile communications-Railway (GSM-R) is the technology used by European Train Control System (ETCS), but it is becoming obsolete
This paper presents a brief description of the communication for railways and its Quality of Service (QoS) parameters for performance measuring
Summary
More and more people use the train as an option for transport such as subways, tramways, or high-speed trains. Because of the importance of the increasing amount of people that choose the train, the transportation system has to obtain certain safety guarantees in order not to put the passengers’ lives at risk, as well as offering a number of services to the passengers. To reach this main goal, railway applications are in continuous evolution. CommunicationsBased Train Control (CBTC), a signaling system for subway trains, based on IEEE 802.11 [1], makes use of different communication technologies, in constant evolution depending on the manufacturer. Public GSM communications employ the channels adjacent to the GSM-R frequency [4]
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