Identity Management in Future Railway Mobile Communication System

Abstract

The Future Railway Mobile Communication System (FRMCS) has emerged as a worldwidstandard for railway communication. This technology enables the operational efficiency and safety orailways to be improved by providing mission critical communications, machine-type communication for the railway system on board, in addition to trackside telemetry and broadband connectivitfor passengers. Different equipment types, users, and functional identities can be involved in communication, and each of them is uniquely identified. Identity management is an important parof the security functions provided by the FRMCS system. This paper presents a service-oriented approach to identity management functionality, enabling service composition for railway applicationand service virtualization. This paper studies functionality for the initial registration and subsequenderegistration of railway devices, users, and their functional identities, in addition to the transfeof the registered identities between different FRMCS serving areas while the train moves. TwFRMCS services that follow the principles of representational state transfer architecture are proposedServices’ functionality is illustrated by use cases, data types, and application programming interfacethat enable services to be interacted with. Identity registration status models are developed, formalldescribed, and mathematically verified. Discussion of the applicability of the proposed services for thimplementation of FRMCS security and safety functions is provided. The presented service-oriented approach features a satisfactory level of flexibility and versatility.