Track

The European Union Agency for Railways (ERA), the International Union of Railways (UIC) and the Rail Telecommunications Technical Committee of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI RT) have started to define the Future Railway Mobile Communication System (FRMCS) as a successor of the current GSM-R system. FRMCS is planned to be operational before GSM-R's predicted saturation in 2030, and SATCOM is identified as a promising component of the future system. The integration of satellite into FRMCS will require developing signalling mechanisms that enable both networks to exchange configuration, management and monitoring information.

TRACK will develop and test the control and management FRMCS protocol stacks, enabling railway control communication via satellite and a full integration with the terrestrial access network. Signalling procedures will be defined and tested, including handshaking, registration, call establishments, priority access, quality of service scheduler, resource management, handovers, outage detections and reporting. The protocols will be 5G compatible to ensure full integration into the FRMCS railway control services. Multi-connectivity capabilities and mechanisms for integration with the user plane will be studied, developed and tested. Packet-level simulation will be carried out to test and evaluate the protocol stacks.

A software control and management (C&M) protocol stack will be implemented, validated and then integrated with basic SDR-based user plane functionality to form a C&M protocols prototype. Integration of the prototype with complete SDR-based user plane functionality will then take place to form a laboratory testbed that will be used for extensive end-to-end testing.

The objective of the activity is to develop and test the control and management protocol stacks of railway control communication via satellite, necessary also for the integration of satellite and terrestrial railway control networks. Testing will be carried out through realistic packet level simulations via a developed software-defined radio testbed.

Last updated date: 7 May 2024