Impact of the traffic load on performance of an alternative LTE railway communication network

Although many countries only now begin to invest in deployment of GSM-Railways (GSM-R) networks, this technology is already obsolete and reveals its significant shortcomings. The most troublesome one is the insufficient number of communication channels offered by GSM-R. This is a major problem obstructing railway operations at big train stations and junctions.

Hence, other technologies, such as Long Term Evolution (LTE), need to be considered as an alternative to GSM-R. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate the capacity increase that railways can expect, from the introduction of LTE as internal communication infrastructure supporting railway signaling.

This work is based on OPNET realistic network simulations, which show the relation between the traffic load (the number of trains transmitting and receiving data in an LTE cell) and the delay performance of the European Train Control System (ETCS) signaling, which is one of the essential railway communication services.

Results of the simulations demonstrate that LTE can solve the urgent capacity problem faced by railways currently deploying GSM-R.