Requirements of GSM technology for the control of high speed trains

The paper analyzes the special characteristics of GSM mobile communications in systems where the mobile stations move at speeds up to 500 km/h. One of the principal propagation problems of the train track´s special environment is the speed of the MS. Another problem is the short loss of communications during the handover process. The propagation environment of the train is very special. Typically, a high speed track is full of cuttings, tunnels, bridges, etc; for this reason, the planning of the coverage must be done very carefully. The facilities and capabilities of GSM technology would be very interesting for railway applications, but GSM-R technology has not been commercially proved for high speed applications, so that a great effort is required to adapt GSM technology to this new applications. Although the changes in BTS and terminal are very small, the planning and network design is completely different from that of commercial networks.