5G-PICTURE: Railway Test-bed

5G Context

Today's current communication systems are unable to provide adequate services for the needs of both passengers and rail operators as worldwide demand for rail travel continues to grow. Improved rail services will come from novel data-driven information and communication solutions, enabling the monitoring, exploitation of the energy and asset information for the entire railway, as well as the analysis of various systems. Managing huge amounts of data is very time consuming and taxing with current technologies. 5G will overcome these limitations by enabling an entire generational shift, ultimately leading to 1ms of latency and 1Gbps download speeds. The shift from the old GSM-R and dedicated systems used by railways for signalling will be stepwise as diverse 5G technology enablers and use cases are tested over coming years. 5G-PICTURE is one such example with a use-case experiment requiring a shared 5G multitenant network aimed at accelerating 5G New Radio (NR) deployments in railways.

5G-PICTURE Advances

• Network ʽsoftwarisationʼ, migrating from the conventional closed networking model to an open reference platform.
• HW programmability, where the HW is configured directly by network functions to provide the required performance. This is expected to enable the provisioning of any service by flexibly mixing-and-matching network, compute and storage resources without sacrificing performance and efficiency as is the case in today’s NFV-based solutions.

 The 5G-PICTURE demonstration took place in November 2019 in Barcelona. 

Its main goals were to show the development and integration of:

•  State of the art mmWave beam technologies following trains at full speed from Blu Wireless Technology.
•  Total most cost efficient G metro optical network for multiple 10 Gbps auto tunable services along a rail track from ADVA Optical Networking. 
•  Mobility server function to keep continuous connectivity acrss tracks: CNIT. 

All these support less than 1 ms latency and precision time synchronision key for rail critical services.

5G-PICTURE has demonstrated that it can provide coverage to approximately 1.5 km of track with a target of 1 Gbps throughput to a train running at 90 km/h.

The final integration work has been done in the COMSA testbed in Madrid and a live railways network in Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat de Catalunya (FGC), including development and integration in the trackside/stations infrastructure and in the train telecom network.

Location: Barcelona (Spain). Test-bed integration: Madrid. Live railways network in Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat de Catalunya (FGC). 

Date: November 2019.

Vertical Partners involved: Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat de Catalunya (FGC) (public company for transportation, trucking, railroad), COMSA Industrial, ADVA Optical Networking, Blu Wireless Technology Ltd., Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Telecomunicazioni (CNIT).

Also involved: COSMOTE, EURECOM, IHP, TransPacket AS, University of Bristol.

Others iPartners: Airrays GmbH, Huawei Technologies Duesseldorf GmbH, i2CAT, Mellanox Technologies Ltd, Telecom Italia (TIM), TU Dresden, University of Paderborn, University of Thessaly, Zeetta Networks

5G-PICTURE Website | @5G_PICTURE