Railway services support over a 5G infrastructure exploiting a multi-technology wireless transport network

Abstract

Transportation, and particularly railways, has been one of the main vertical sectors targeted by 5G, where achieving seamless connectivity to and in the train is still a real challenge. Nowadays, efforts are steered towards the standardization of the Future Rail Mobile Communication System (FRMCS), having 5G as the cornerstone to deploy all type of vertical services on top of a common 5G cellular system. There is work ongoing in the 5G-VICTORI project focused on the assessment of the capability to seamlessly serve all communication requirements of train operators and passengers in railways. This paper proposes a 5G platform for railway verticals to deploy their services that makes use of a wireless transport infrastructure consisting of heterogeneous networks, e.g. Sub-6 GHz, millimeter wave (mmWave). This platform provides network and compute/storage resources to the ground and on-board 5G segments. The paper delves into the challenges for handover management across the proposed multi-technology transport infrastructure and presents the implementation of a vertical application on top of such platform.