Carlos Rodríguez

A survey on future railway radio communications services: challenges and opportunities

Radio communications is one of the most disruptive technologies in railways, enabling a huge set of value-added services that greatly improve many aspects of railways, making them more efficient, safer, and profitable. Lately, some major technologies like ERTMS for high-speed railways and CBTC for subways have made possible a reduction of headway and increased safety never before seen in this field. The railway industry is now looking at wireless communications with great interest, and this can be seen in many projects around the world. Thus, railway radio communications is again a flourishing field, with a lot of research and many things to be done. This survey article explains both opportunities and challenges to be addressed by the railway sector in order to obtain all the possible benefits of the latest radio technologies.

Delay Spread and Electromagnetic Reverberation in Subway Tunnels and Stations

This letter presents an extensive campaign of wideband propagation measurements conducted in a modern subway environment in Madrid, Spain, at 980 and 2450 MHz. Measurements have been made using a channel sounder in a realistic environment of tunnel and station. Based on the measurement results, the principal parameters, such as mean power and delay spread, have been extracted for wideband propagation modeling. Furthermore, the results have been used to model electromagnetic reverberation, quality factor, and transition region between tunnel and station. The quantitative results provide a detailed wideband model of subway environment, as well as determine the design tradeoffs inside real tunnels and stations, in terms of optimal frequency band, antenna position, and expected multipath.

A Survey of Channel Measurements and Models for Current and Future Railway Communication Systems

Modern society demands cheap, more efficient, and safer public transport. These enhancements, especially an increase in efficiency and safety, are accompanied by huge amounts of data traffic that need to be handled by wireless communication systems. Hence, wireless communications inside and outside trains are key technologies to achieve these efficiency and safety goals for railway operators in a cost-efficient manner. This paper briefly describes nowadays used wireless technologies in the railway domain and points out possible directions for future wireless systems. Channel measurements and models for wireless propagation are surveyed and their suitability in railway environments is investigated. Identified gaps are pointed out and solutions to fill those gaps for wireless communication links in railway environments are proposed.

Keyhole Estimation of an MIMO-OFDM Train-to-Wayside Communication System on Subway Tunnels

This letter presents a deep insight on a real implementation of a train-to-wayside radio on subway tunnels that makes use of a 2 × 2 multiple-input-multiple-output orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) setup. The main purpose of this letter is to study in detail the keyhole phenomenon of an MIMO-OFDM train-to-wayside communication system on a tunnel. MIMO keyholes are studied in different tunnels sections, and capacity results are provided. Moreover, we introduce the first keyhole measurements on a railway tunnel. Finally, we follow a quantitative approach to estimate keyhole probabilities on each tunnel stretch and capacity outage curves.

Keyholes in MIMO-OFDM: Train-to-Wayside Communications in Railway Tunnels

One of the key challenges in railway engineering is how to provide passengers an efficient, secure, and safe service. To achieve this, operators and stakeholders demand robust and high-capacity train-to-wayside broadband radio. Current radio technologies implement MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output) technology, whose use requires a good characterization of the propagation. In this paper, the results of an experimental campaign on MIMO propagation in subway tunnels are presented. The campaign makes use of an OFDM testbed at roughly 600 MHz, allowing the measurement of the channel transfer matrix under different conditions regarding polarization, antenna separation, tunnel cross section, power allocation algorithm, and so forth. Particular attention is paid to the probability of appearance of keyholes, which imply a severe degradation of the MIMO performance even when transmitter and receiver antennas are uncorrelated. The measurements are carried out using a train that travels at the normal operative velocities. As a result of the measurements, it has been found that the use of vertical polarization at both terminals is advantageous and that, on average but for a narrow margin, λ-spaced antennas outperform λ/2-spaced ones (90% capacities of 7.00 and 6.76 bps/Hz, resp.), although the latter show a lower probability of keyholes. However, keyhole probabilities are always below 2%, so their influence on the performance of the whole system is limited.