Long Term Evolution (LTE) in High Speed Railway Environments: Feasibility Study and Top Challenges

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is considered to be the natural evolution for current GSM-R system in high speed railway environments, not only for its technical advantages and increased performance, but also due to the current evolution of public communication systems. In railway environments, mission critical services, operation assistance services and passenger services must be supported by reliable mobile communication systems. Reliability and availability are key concerns to the railway operators and as a consequence, railway operators are usually more conservative adopters of Information Communication Technologies (ICT). Therefore, a feasibility study of the LTE system to become the new railway mobile communication system must be performed. Under this scope, LTE key technology features and mechanisms to support both the migration of current railway services and the provision of potential future ones, will be identified and analyzed. Besides, LTE top challenges to address the specific requirements and needs of railway communication services must be assessed. These challenges include provision of voice service in LTE networks, handover performance, multicast multimedia transmission, provision of group communications service and railway emergency calls, among others.