Functional analysis between LTE-railway and public safety-LTE

Abstract

Due to the evolution of wireless communications technology, Long Term Evolution (LTE), which is a 4th generation mobile communications system, has been adopted as a railway communications system. This LTE Railway (LTE-R) system is composed of various elemental functions, which are largely categorized into public safety and wireless communications for train control. Research on the public safety functions of railway communications have their roots in TRS based national public safety communication systems, and research on wireless communications functions for train control have their roots GSM-R, which is utilized by the ETCS in Europe. Based on these circumstances, this paper first analyzes the requirements for developing public safety technology in LTE-R, and compares those requirements with the functions of public safety LTE (PS-LTE), which is being deployed for the first time in the world by the South Korean government. Based on an analysis of the common and specific functions of LTE-R and PS-LTE, we conclude that there is little problem in integrating LTE-R and PS-LTE from the perspective of functionality. Second, this paper provides a comparison of the LTE-R requirements for the Quality of Service (QoS) with those of GSM-R utilized by the ETCS. This offers a guideline to allow LTE-R to be applied to a 500km/h train control system.