Mainline and urban railway networks play a pivotal role in the economic growth of a country. High urbanisation rates in metropolitan areas have increased the demand for high-capacity rail infrastructures, which require an efficient interoperability among several systems and services; that calls for high standards of safety and reliability.
In turn, rail systems and services call for a high level of innovation in the telecommunications, and automation and control fields. In recent years, the technological progress has resulted in the development of systems for automatic train protection, operations and control that make use of different telecommunications standards and technologies.
In recent years, traditional wireless networks have been playing a key role in supporting railway signalling systems. They run alongside the railway infrastructure and provide voice and data services for train control and operations, as well as emergency communications, video surveillance and protection, multimedia services and also passenger connectivity. However, the coverage of such wireless networks seems to be not efficient. That is either because they are not specifically developed for the railway infrastructure, or because they cannot be adapted to keep up pace with the dynamics, or meet the mobility requirements, of railway infrastructures. Therefore, train operators need to put in place broadband telecommunications networks, through heterogeneous technologies, whether fixed or wireless. Heterogeneity of these networks is becoming a real headache for train operators and infrastructure managers: WI-FI, GSM-R, Satellite, 3G / 4G networks.
FAST-TRACKS project proposes the development and commercialization of a low cost telecommunication system, which addresses the main problems faced at present in the integration of a traditional Wi-Fi system within the railway technological infrastructure. The project aims at covering a functional gap in the railway radio telecommunication infrastructure. The project is based on the design of a reprogrammable radio supporting different Wi-Fi, Cellular and LTE standards at the same time, which will foster and guarantee the convergence between automatic train control systems and network telecommunication standards.
The main advantages of the multi-transport radio proposed are based on two pillars:
• high adaptability of the radio to the continuous evolution of wireless standards and cellular technologies;
• development of an innovative and not yet on the market product.
The proposed infrastructure, due to high-speed capacity, dual embedded radio and configurable approach, permits to integrate vital and non-vital services on the same wireless backbone simply dedicating different radio to different services operating with a full redundant architecture.
