A Survey of Wireless Communication Technologies & Their Performance for High Speed Railways

High Speed Railway (HSR) provides its customers not only safety, security, comfort and on-time commuting, but also a fast transportation alternative to air travel or regular passenger rail services. Providing these benefits would not be possible without the tremendous growth and prevalence of wireless communication technologies. Due to advances in wireless communication systems, both trains and passengers are connected through high speed wireless networks to the Internet, data centers and railroad control centers. Railroad communities, academia, related industries and standards bodies, even the European Space Agency, are involved in advancing developments of HSR for highly connected train communication systems. The goal of these efforts is to provide the capabilities for uninterrupted high-speed fault-tolerant communication networks for all possible geographic, structural and weather conditions. This survey provides an overview of the current state-of-the-art and future trends for wireless technologies aiming to realize the concept of HSR communication services. Our goal is to highlight the challenges for these technologies, including GSM-R, Wi-Fi, WIMAX, LTE-R, RoF, LCX & Cognitive Radio, the offered solutions, their performance, and other related issues. Currently, providing HSR services is the goal of many countries across the globe. Europe, Japan & Taiwan, China, as well as North & South America have increased their efforts to advance HSR technologies to monitor and control not only the operations but also to deliver extensive broadband solutions to passengers. This survey determined a trend of the industry to transition control plane operations towards narrowband frequencies, i.e. LTE400/700, and to utilize concurrently other technologies for broadband access for passengers such that services of both user and train control systems are supported. With traditional technologies, a tradeoff was required and often favored train control services over passenger amenities. However, with the advances in communication systems, such as LTE-R and cognitive radios, it is becoming possible for system designers to offer rich services to passengers while also providing support for enhanced train control operations such as Positive Train Control

Mobile Broadband Scaling and Enhancement for Fast Moving Trains

Internet is an important part of our life, whether traveling or at home. The broadband services available at home are reliable and are usually at constant speed. The people traveling especially in fast moving trains are at higher mobility and may be moving in areas of less connectivity, and providing a reliable service to them is a challenging task. One possible solution to this is to provide communication through an on-board Wi-Fi, which takes services from a central Wi-Fi situated in the middle of the train, which is connected to cellular radio service long-term evolution for railways. The network consists of LTE-R which is dedicated for railway communication only, a public mobile network, which supports LTE-R in the areas of no coverage and high traffic conditions and a public safety network in emergency conditions. The work is verified with the help of simulations on MATLAB, considering different traffic scenarios. The BSs placed at a distance of 2.5 Km and antenna height used is 45 m are equipped with 3G and 4G interfaces, a universal mobile telecommunications services (UMTS) and radio access network (RAN). The UMTS interface is used for voice services and handover when spectrum available in the next cell is less

Cooperative and coordinated Mobile Femtocells technology in high-speed vehicular environments: mobility and interference management

In future networks, most users who will be accessing wireless broadband will be vehicular. Serving those users cost-effectively and improving their signal quality has been the main concern of many studies. Thus, the deployment of Mobile Femtocell (Mobile-Femto) technology on public transportation is seen to be one of the promising solutions. Mobile-Femto comes with its mobility and interference challenges. Therefore, eliminating the Vehicular Penetration Loss (VPL) and interference while improving signal quality and mobility for train passengers is the main concern of this paper. The initial system-level evaluation showed that the dedicated Mobile-Femto deployment has great potential in improving users’ experience inside public transportation. The Downlink (DL) results of the Proposed Interference Management Scheme (PIMS) showed significant improvement in Mobile-Femto User Equipment (UE) gains (up to 50%) without impacting the performance of macro UEs. In contrast, the Uplink (UL) results showed noticeable gains for both macro UEs and Mobile-Femto UEs

Towards the Internet of Smart Trains: A Review on Industrial IoT-Connected Railways

[Abstract] Nowadays, the railway industry is in a position where it is able to exploit the opportunities created by the IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) and enabling communication technologies under the paradigm of Internet of Trains. This review details the evolution of communication technologies since the deployment of GSM-R, describing the main alternatives and how railway requirements, specifications and recommendations have evolved over time. The advantages of the latest generation of broadband communication systems (e.g., LTE, 5G, IEEE 802.11ad) and the emergence of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for the railway environment are also explained together with the strategic roadmap to ensure a smooth migration from GSM-R. Furthermore, this survey focuses on providing a holistic approach, identifying scenarios and architectures where railways could leverage better commercial IIoT capabilities. After reviewing the main industrial developments, short and medium-term IIoT-enabled services for smart railways are evaluated. Then, it is analyzed the latest research on predictive maintenance, smart infrastructure, advanced monitoring of assets, video surveillance systems, railway operations, Passenger and Freight Information Systems (PIS/FIS), train control systems, safety assurance, signaling systems, cyber security and energy efficiency. Overall, it can be stated that the aim of this article is to provide a detailed examination of the state-of-the-art of different technologies and services that will revolutionize the railway industry and will allow for confronting today challenges.Galicia. Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria; ED431C 2016-045Galicia. Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria; ED341D R2016/012Galicia. Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria; ED431G/01Agencia Estatal de Investigación (España); TEC2013-47141-C4-1-RAgencia Estatal de Investigación (España); TEC2015-69648-REDCAgencia Estatal de Investigación (España); TEC2016-75067-C4-1-