On the feasibility of high speed railway mmWave channels in tunnel scenario

Abstract

Rail traffic is widely acknowledged as an efficient and green transportation pattern and its evolution attracts a lot of attention. However, the key point of the evolution is how to develop the railway services from traditional handling of the critical signaling applications only to high data rate applications, such as real-time videos for surveillance and entertainments. The promising method is trying to use millimeter wave which includes dozens of GHz bandwidths to bridge the high rate demand and frequency shortage. In this paper, the channel characteristics in an arched railway tunnel are investigated owing to their significance of designing reliable communication systems. Meantime, as millimeter wave suffers from higher propagation loss, directional antenna is widely accepted for designing the communication system. The specific changes that directional antenna brings to the radio channel are studied and compared to the performances of omnidirectional antenna. Note that the study is based on enhanced wide-band ray tracing tool where the electromagnetic and scattering parameters of the main materials of the tunnel are measured and fitted with predicting models.