The continuous and swift progression of both wireless and wired communication technologies in today's
world owes its success to the foundational systems established earlier. These systems serve as the building
blocks that enable the enhancement of services to cater to evolving requirements. Studying the
vulnerabilities of previously designed systems and their current usage leads to the development of new
communication technologies replacing the old ones such as GSM-R in the railway field. The current industrial
research has a specific focus on finding an appropriate telecommunication solution for railway
communications that will replace the GSM-R standard which will be switched off in the next years.
Various standardization organizations are currently exploring and designing a radiofrequency technology
based standard solution to serve railway communications in the form of FRMCS (Future Railway Mobile
Communication System) to substitute the current GSM-R. Bearing on this topic, the primary strategic
objective of the research is to assess the feasibility to leverage on the current public network technologies
such as LTE to cater to mission and safety critical communication for low density lines. The research aims
to identify the constraints, define a service level agreement with telecom operators, and establish the
necessary implementations to make the system as reliable as possible over an open and public network,
while considering safety and cybersecurity aspects.
The LTE infrastructure would be utilized to transmit the vital data for the communication of a railway system
and to gather and transmit all the field measurements to the control room for maintenance purposes. Given
the significance of maintenance activities in the railway sector, the ongoing research includes the
implementation of a machine learning algorithm to detect railway equipment faults, reducing time and
human analysis errors due to the large volume of measurements from the field
