Search Results (6)

Robust, reliable, and secure communications are essential for efficient railway operation and keeping employees and passengers safe. The Future Railway Mobile Communication System (FRMCS) is a global standard aimed at providing innovative, essential, and high-performance communication applications in railway transport. In comparison with the legacy communication system (GSM-R), it provides high data rates, ultra-high reliability, and low latency. The FRMCS architecture will also benefit from cloud computing, following the principles of the cloud-native 5G core network design based on Network Function Virtualization (NFV). In this paper, an approach to the management of virtualized FRMCS applications is presented. First, the key management functionality related to the virtualized FRMCS application is identified based on an analysis of the different use cases. Next, this functionality is synthesized as RESTful services. The communication between application management and the services is designed as Application Programing Interfaces (APIs). The APIs are formally verified by modeling the management states of an FRMCS application instance from different points of view, and it is mathematically proved that the management state models are synchronized in time. The latency introduced by the designed APIs, as a key performance indicator, is evaluated through emulation. Full article

Field-road mode classification (FRMC) that identifies “in-field” and “on-road” categories for Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) trajectory points of agricultural machinery containing geographic information is essential for effective crop improvement. Most previous studies utilize local trajectory features (i.e., the relationships between a point and its neighboring points), but they ignore global trajectory features (i.e., the relationships between the point and all points of the trajectory), leading to difficulty in improving the overall classification performance. The global trajectory features are useful for FRMC because they contain rich trajectory information (e.g., mode switching and motion tendency). Therefore, a ConvTEBiLSTM network-based method is proposed to improve the overall performance. Firstly, nine statistical features (e.g., speed and direction) are extracted from the original data and fed into the ConvTEBiLSTM network. Then, the ConvTEBiLSTM network combining the Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory network, 1D Convolution network, and Transformer-Encoder network is used to extract and fuse local and global trajectory features. Finally, a linear classifier is applied to identify the “field” and “road” categories of GNSS points based on the fused features. Experimental results show that compared with the baselines, our method achieves the best accuracy and F1-score of 97.38% and 92.74% on our Harvester dataset, respectively. Full article

European rail transport policy aims to create a single railway area. European Union (EU) issues, for this purpose, sets of regulations and directives. Individual countries are involved in its implementation according to their capabilities. The aim of this article is to examine the current state of interoperability in the EU, especially in the Czech Republic, and to compare selected mobile applications regarding the possibility of unifying their design of mobile applications. A systematic literature research review methodology was used. The sources of information were mainly the scientific database Web of Science and the database of EU documents EUR-Lex. When examining one of the main parameters—the use of mobile networks—it was found that all of the selected applications use public mobile networks, none of them uses the Global System for Mobile Communications–Railway (GSM–R) network. This finding confirmed the theoretical assumption that this network is not currently ready for more or less massive operation of mobile applications. The possibility of using the next generation railway mobile network is open for discussion as one of the next steps to ensure interoperability in telematics applications. Full article

The railway sector has been characterized by important innovations regarding digital technologies for train-to-ground communications. The actual GSM-R system is considered an obsolescent technology expected to be dismissed by 2030. The future communication systems in the rail sectors, such as Adaptable Communication Systems (ACS) and Future Railway Mobile Communication Systems (FRMCS), can manage different bearers as 4G/5G terrestrial technologies and satellites. In this environment, the new High Throughput Satellite (HTS) Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations promise very interesting performances from data rate and coverage points of view. The paper analyzes the LEO constellations of Starlink and OneWeb using public data. The Rome–Florence railway line is considered for simulations. The results evidence the LEO satellite can provide interesting performance in terms of visibility, service connectivity, and traffic capacities (up to 1 Gbps). This feature enables the LEO to fully manage a high amount of data, especially in the railway scenarios of the next years when video data applications will be more present. Full article

This paper describes the prototype and tests carried out to demonstrate the feasibility of implementing 4G/5G systems based on mobile network operators (MNOs) to transmit signalling critical data for railway systems as part of a possible solution for the Future Railway Mobile Communication System (FRMCS). This communication system design is performed from a protocol-stack perspective, introducing the KPIs for the physical layer (RSRP, RSRQ and SINR), network layer (latency and jitter) and application layer (signalling communication timeout). The analysis focuses on the characterisation of signalling critical railway data to assess the data traffic behaviour in a telecommunications laboratory. Finally, the study validates the approach in a realistic railway environment. Full article

The Future Railway Mobile Communication System (FRMCS) has emerged as a worldwide standard for railway communication. This technology enables the operational efficiency and safety of railways to be improved by providing mission critical communications, machine-type communication for the railway system on board, in addition to trackside telemetry and broadband connectivity for passengers. Different equipment types, users, and functional identities can be involved in communication, and each of them is uniquely identified. Identity management is an important part of the security functions provided by the FRMCS system. This paper presents a service-oriented approach to identity management functionality, enabling service composition for railway applications and service virtualization. This paper studies functionality for the initial registration and subsequent deregistration of railway devices, users, and their functional identities, in addition to the transfer of the registered identities between different FRMCS serving areas while the train moves. Two FRMCS services that follow the principles of representational state transfer architecture are proposed. Services’ functionality is illustrated by use cases, data types, and application programming interfaces that enable services to be interacted with. Identity registration status models are developed, formally described, and mathematically verified. Discussion of the applicability of the proposed services for the implementation of FRMCS security and safety functions is provided. The presented service-oriented approach features a satisfactory level of flexibility and versatility. Full article