HSR Communications in 5G Era
Anurag Vijay Agrawal1, Meenakshi Rawat2
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee
Roorkee, India
1anuraga@ieee.org, 2meenakshirawat@ieee.org
Abstract—High speed railways (HSR) are a viable solution to
the existing road-traffic conditions. The multiple antenna
schemes, together with the higher modulation quadrature
amplitude modulation (QAM) mapping schemes, have become a
boon for modern HSR communication systems with the advent of
the 5G era. The paper analyzes the effect of complex modulation
mapping scheme 64-QAM on various types of antenna diversity
configurations like single-input-single-output (SISO) and
multiple-input-single-output (MISO). Numerical analyses and
simulations establish the parameters such as reliability and
throughput performances with higher-order antenna
configurations and varying speeds of the train for HSR
communications to a single-user MISO system. In this paper, for
infrastructure-to-train HSR communications scenario with SISO
antenna configuration, 16-QAM improves throughput by about
two times, whereas 64-QAM improves it by about three times as
compared to the quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK)
modulation scheme. Moreover, MISO 4×1 provides 4.6 and 7.4
times improvement in block error rate (BLER) as compared with
MISO 2×1 and SISO configuration respectively, and the
throughput improves by 29.07% and 58.81% with MISO 4×1 for
the complex modulation scheme 64-QAM at a train speed of 300
kilometers per hour.
Keywords—5G, BLER, HSR, MISO, NR, QAM, Throughput
I. INTRODUCTION
Now-a-days, human population growth is largely in urban
areas, resulting in two-thirds of the world’s population living in
cities. The rising number of vehicles, due to this increase in the
urban population, degrades the quality of road journeys. It
results in loss of time as well as fuel and places a huge burden
on the world economy. Railway services are the perfect
worldwide solution to the aforesaid problems. High Speed
Railways (HSRs) further improve rail services, brings
convenience to people’s lives, and are considered as one of the
most sustainable developments for ground transportation. The
Indian Railways’ VISION 2020 envisages that several high
speed corridors with speed up to 350 kilometers per hour
(kmph) would be developed by 2020 using the Shinkansen
model along the lines of India’s Bharatmala highways
development scheme [1].
The future development of railway is highly desired in the
5G era, as the users across the globe are now demanding to
have intelligent transportation services. Today, wireless
communication standards have been evolving from 1G to 5G.
Consequently, railway communication standards also need to
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Fig. 1. Infrastructure-to-train HSR communications scenario
evolve from a voice and traditional train-controlling standard
to have various enhanced data rate applications during the
journey. These applications may include high definition CCTV
surveillance during journey, onboard uninterrupted internet
services, high speed streaming, mobile ticketing, and the
Internet of Things for railways [2]. A new standard 5G New
Radio (NR) may provide low latency and high throughput, but
the small cell densification layout for 5G NR needs a service
center to communicate with the local base station (BS) [3].
Moreover, 5G NR is supposed to work only when the line-of-
sight with these small cells and millimeter-wave antennas
should have in proximity to the users (data). Therefore, Long
Term Evolution for Railways (LTE-R) has become a preferred
wireless communication standard for providing broadband
services during the high speed train journey. Also, the adoption
of modern physical layer technologies such as orthogonal
frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and multiple antenna
configurations [4]-[6], and network layer schemes such as all
Internet Protocol based packet switching, makes LTE-R a
successful global standard.
Modern transceivers need highly spectral efficient
modulation schemes to fulfill the rising demands for greater
data throughput in an overcrowded spectral environment. The
amount of transferred data may be increased either by
maintaining the spectral efficiency as constant and increase the
bandwidth of the transmission signal or by using a more
complex modulation mapping scheme and then increase the
spectral efficiency for the specified bandwidth [7]-[8]. Higher-
order quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) types such as
64-QAM would produce higher data rates than 32-QAM or 16-
QAM or quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK). LTE-R may
achieve higher data rates by combining higher-order
modulation schemes with multiple antenna schemes [9].
In this work, the authors evaluate the block error rate
(BLER), and data throughput with SISO and various MISO
 modes in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for TABLE I. SIMULATION PARAMETERS
infrastructure-to-railway HSR communications scenario. The Name Value(s)
transmission is done for a radio frequency (RF) downlink Transmission System Downlink LTE-R
channel with QPSK, 16-QAM and 64-QAM mapping types Channel Type Line of Sight, Rural Macro
and the system supports 10 MHz bandwidth. The remaining Traffic Full Buffer Model
sections are organized as follows. Section II shows the system Bandwidth 10 MHz
simulation parameters and includes a short description of Carrier Frequency 2 GHz
Subcarrier Spacing 15 kHz
reliable HSR communications in the 5G era. Section III Diversity Scheme Transmit Diversity
consists of the results with discussion and, finally, the paper Coding Scheme Turbo Coding, Rate = 1/6
concludes with Section IV. Antenna Arrangement SISO, MISO
Frame FDD Mode
II. RELIABLE HSR COMMUNICATIONS FFT Size 1024
Radio Frames 200 (in numbers)
In HSR communication systems, signals experience fading Sub-frames 2000 (in numbers)
with high mobility, which gives rise to high BLER. Diversity is Sampling Frequency 15.36 MHz
an important factor in combating fading and co-channel Modulation Mappings QPSK, 16-QAM, 64-QAM
interference [10] to improve signal reliability. Transmit Channel Estimation Scheme Minimum Mean Square Error
Detection Scheme Maximum Likelihood Detection
diversity, is an approach whereby multiple forms of the same
signal may be transmitted and/or received and combined in the
receiver, i.e. it supports the transmission of redundant
information across multiple antennas at each subcarrier to
maximize the diversity advantage in fading channels [11]-[12].
In this way, the transmit diversity improves communication
reliability in HSR broadband communications by the diversity
gain.

A. Infrastructure-to-train Scenario
The main goal with HSR communications is to achieve
various high data rate applications for operators as well as for
the passengers. The authors analyze the infrastructure-to-train
scenario, where the clover-leaf single-cell configuration [13]
has been used for BS deployment. Each BS has three sectors
fed by an antenna, and the BSs are placed on the lattice of the
new bigger hexagon, as shown in Fig. 1. The BSs are deployed
Fig. 2. BLER with different modulation mapping types at various train
linearly along the railway on the lattice of the new bigger speeds for SISO configuration
hexagon, and the train communication takes place using the
dedicated track.
where sub-frame is abbreviated as SF, TB is Transport Block
B. System Model size and CYC is the pointer showing CRC value corresponding
to every sub-frame. The CYC pointer ‘1’ shows the success of
The BLER and throughput are the significant performance
CRC and the value‘0’ shows its failure.
indicators to analyze the impact of modulation mapping
schemes with different MISO schemes [14]. The BLER [15]
value establishes the reliability of signal transmission over any III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
cellular communication system, where the data transmission is The analysis for 5G HSR communications in terms of
said to be reliable if the receiver cyclic redundancy check BLER and throughput performances is carried out for system
(CRC) is being appropriately matched with the transport block model parameters as given in Table I. The results for the
CRC. The authors target a BLER value equal to 0.1 for having infrastructure-to-train scenario is represented in Fig. 2 and Fig.
appropriate successful transmission over the wireless channel. 3 and the investigations are done for various antenna
BLER is given by: configurations for train speeds varying from 100 to 300 kmph.
It is investigated from Fig. 2 that an SNR equals to atleast 11
 (1 − CYC )
SF Stop
dB is needed to maintain the target BLER value 0.1, which has
BLER = SF Start
(1)
been achieved with QPSK mapping when the train speed is 100
 SF Start (1)
SF Stop

kmph. Fig. 3 shows that only about 2 Mbps throughput is

The Throughput [16] is represented in normalized form as needed to attain that much BLER.
the ratio of averaged throughput to its maximum possible value Fig. 2 further signifies that the 0.1 BLER value is also
over the specified number of sub-frames and is given by: realized for 16-QAM and 64-QAM schemes with 18 dB SNR
and 26 dB SNR respectively at 100 kmph corresponding to the

SF Stop
SF Start B
T ∗ CYC same SISO transmission mode. It implies that 16-QAM and
Throughput (Normalized) = (2)
 64-QAM modulation schemes consume more signal power as
SF Stop
T
SF Start B

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Fig. 3. Throughput with different modulation mapping types at various
train speeds for SISO configuration
Fig. 4. BLER comparison chart for SISO configuration
Fig. 5. Throughput comparison chart for SISO configuration
compared to QPSK. Fig. 2 and Fig. 3 also establish that BLER
and throughput deteriorate as the train speed increases in HSR
communications. The comparison of these performance
parameters for modulation schemes QPSK, 16-QAM and 64-
QAM at different train speeds is shown in Fig. 4 and Fig. 5 for
good signal strengths, i.e., for SNR values greater than 25 dB.
Fig. 6 and Fig. 7 represent the results for the HSR
communications with complex modulation scheme 64QAM at
300 kmph for SISO, MISO 2×1 and MISO 4×1 antenna
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Fig. 6. BLER with 64-QAM modulation mapping at 300 kmph
Fig. 7. Throughput with 64-QAM modulation mapping at 300 kmph
configurations. Both SISO and MISO 2×1 modes may not
provide reliable data transmission with 64QAM at high
mobility of 300 kmph, and the target BLER value 0.1 is
achieved only by MISO 4×1 mode at an SNR of 23 dB. The
same mode is capable of achieving 8.6 Mbps throughput. The
maximum throughput achieved is 9.1 Mbps at high mobility of
300 kmph with MISO 4×1 configuration for an SNR of atleast
36 dB corresponding to 64-QAM complex modulation scheme.
IV. CONCLUSION
Different MISO configurations have been analyzed in HSR
infrastructure-to-train communications scenario for 5G era.
The BLER and throughput calculations establish that better
reliability and high throughput performances are possible with
higher-order MISO configurations. The authors found that
reliability and throughput performances degrade with increase
in train speed. The results show that the throughput with 16-
QAM and 64-QAM improves by about two times and three
times respectively, as compared to the QPSK modulation
scheme. Moreover, MISO 4×1 provides 4.6 and 7.4 times
improvement in BLER as compared with MISO 2×1 and SISO
configuration respectively, and the throughput improves by
29.07% and 58.81% with MISO 4×1 for complex modulation
scheme 64-QAM at 300 kmph train speed.
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