Improvments in Railway Communication via GSM-R
Kira Kastell, Steffen Bug, Alexey Nazarov, and Rolf Jakoby
Technische Universitat Darmstadt
Institut fur Hochfrequenztechnik
64283 Darmstadt, Germany
{kastell, bug, nazarov, jakoby}l hf.tu-darmstadt.de
Abstract - In this paper we identify several shortcomings in
GSM-R use for high-speed trains. Especially cell reselection and
handover last too long. If they are combined with Group Receive
Mode this causes additional problems. One single solution can
help to cope with them. If handover and cell reselection are aided
by location information they can be accelerated. Three strategies
how to derive location information in railway environment are
briefly explained. The location information is taken to determine
the next serving cell. This shortens preparation time for cell
reselection significantly. Railway environment makes it easy to
estimate the location. In the outlook we show how to transform
the results given here to new applications for area-wide mobile
communication systems.
Keywords- GSM-R; handover; high-speed
I. GSM-R INTRODUCTION
In the beginning 1990s the European railway operators
decided to set up one single communication system all over
Europe. This was driven by several needs. On the one hand
some operators had to change their communication band as
licenses for some frequencies expired and were not re-granted
by the local regulation authorities. On the other hand - as the
travel across borders of different countries increases - there was
a strong wish to simplify communication between entities of
different operators and countries. Up to then each train passing
a border and thus operating on tracks of a foreign operator had
to carry a separate communication system for each country, as
they were merely interoperable.
The communication between operator / dispatcher and
train / operating staff on board was based on analog systems.
Therefore the European railway operators took the chance to
switch to a digital communication system. They also tried to
merge several communication systems that each country had in
operation into only one. Among the different communication
systems in railway environment are private mobile radio,
maintenance radio, analog train communication, radio on
dedicated routes, shunting radio, tunnel radio, radio for local
and nationwide security authorities, radio control for
locomotives.
One system fitting all the different needs of the railway
operators did not exist. Nevertheless the operators decided to
build a GSM-based system, because GSM proved to be very
reliable as it was already real-life tested by millions of users.
But as mentioned before, GSM had to be slightly changed for
the need of the railways. These changes were included in GSM
0-7803-9392-9/06/$20.00 (c) 2006 IEEE
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phase 2+. In that phase only some aspects of the standard were
revised instead of having a completely new release.
The railway specific changes were:
- GSM had to cope with higher speed of users. Up to
then it was designed for 250 km/h only and it was
foreseeable, that high-speed trains will operate much
faster. Therefore it was recommended to cope with
speed up to 500 km/h [1].
- Another need for a dispatcher responsible for a certain
area is a mode, where he can call all trains in this area
at the same time to inform them about some specific
events as e.g. problems along their (common) track.
This is where the features Voice Group Call Mode
(VGCM), Voice Broadcast Service (VBS) and Group
Receive Mode (GRM) come from [2]. The first two
ones differ in a way that VGCM allows the called
parties to answer.
- Service precedence and preemption, giving different
priorities to calls depending on the urgency for
signaling purposes etc. Is necessary to ensure that
signaling information always is more important than
for example voice calls or transfer of customer
information (e.g. purchase of a ticket) [2].
- Functional and location dependent addressing means
an addressing easy adoptable to the numbering scheme
of the trains. This is a major need as trains are re-
composed for operation every night depending on the
needed capacity on certain connections. There is no
life-long global allocation between coaches and
locomotives and the connection this ensemble
operates on. This posed the need of reaching a
dedicated train via its connection dependent train
number. This number depends on the route it takes
and the time it operates, but not on locomotives or
coaches.
- Push-to-talk capability of the mobile equipment was
needed for shunting radio as well as mobile-to-mobile
communication without base station interaction.
In principle the specifications are quite good adopted for
railway use, but as operators also agreed on a European Train
Control System (ETCS) the railway environment poses major
security requirements to the network. The ETCS [3] will
operate or replace the signals and inform the train about the
status of the tracks ahead. If the connection breaks during
ETCS communication, the train will perform an emergency
stop. Therefore the call drop probability has to be kept
extremely low. Most operators claim for 99.9 % reception
probability with 95 % location probability of coverage.
II. INFLUENCES ON THE NETWORK
The high quality - the network has to provide - affects all
aspects of the network. Planning has to ensure better location
and reception probability than for public GSM. Additionally,
handovers have to be planned more carefully.
Handovers can be improved by guaranteeing more overlap
of the service areas of the different cells to have a longer time
to complete the handover. This poses larger costs to network
deployment and is not achievable everywhere in a nation-wide
network with only 18 frequencies granted for GSM-R. But it is
also merely possible to provide wide overlap areas in typical
European railway environment. Special propagation conditions
contain additional noise and interference caused by catenaries
and additional propagation loss by the typical cuttings and
forest aisles that are not only build for the need of having
straight tracks regardless of the topology but also for noise
protection reasons. Europe in many parts of the country is quite
hilly. This results in a lot of tunnels and bridges along the
track. Because of the metallic break shoe residue of the trains
and the high reliability constraints, the tunnels cannot be served
with leaky cables. Therefore to provide a reception quality
good enough for the high-speed demand, in tunnels there is a
cell range of about 1 to 2 km served by high gain antennas
specially fitted to the pressure situation in tunnels.
There also exist problems at the entrance / exit of the
tunnels. As not every tunnel entrance has its own antenna - the
tunnels might not be long enough to enable two antennas in on
tunnel without major interference - the following situation
occurs: The tunnel is served by one antenna inside (A) and one
antenna outside (B). The propagation from antenna A becomes
weak at the exit of the tunnel as the waves propagate left and
right beside the tunnel. The propagation from antenna B gets
weak as soon as it reaches the tunnel, because a lot of the
energy is absorbed by the hill the tunnel is built in. This leads
to very small overlap areas around the ends of tunnels.
This is the worst case, but in general there is a problem
with this overlap areas, as they always appear small if you are
moving with high speed. To cope with this problem we need
faster handover performance. This was not foreseen in the
specifications, as it was not calculated if GSM can support
high-speed users moving with 500 km/h. It was left to accurate
network planning.
As network planning cannot provide a sufficient and cost
effective solution we here analyze ways to speed up handover
as well.
Figure 1. Situation at tunnel exit / entrance.
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Licell 1 with Ecell 2
quasi-omni-directional
antenna configuration
Figure 2. Antenna configuration and cells along lines.
A. Network Planning
In our approach we take advantage of the typical railway
scenario to speed up both, preparation and execution of
handover and cell reselection. In a railway environment your
service area consists of corridors around the tracks. If you plan
a network for railway purposes only you try to use high gain
antennas with small beams to cause small interference to
systems beside the tracks and to optimize cell range (see fig. 1).
To avoid rapid growth in handovers at every cell border
network planners are asked to put the two antennas served by
the same base station in a quasi-omni-directional configuration
(figure 2). That means you couple both antennas and assign
them the same frequency so that sector 1 and sector 2 form one
single cell. This shortens the number of handovers by about a
half as not every station can be built that way and there are still
some single antenna sectors. This is where network planners
can help to expand the tunnel cell size to 2 to 3 km.
But the major advantage we take is the shape of the service
area. As trains are bounded to tracks it is easier to predict their
whereabouts. This is where it becomes very interesting to
integrate location information into the handover preparation.
If we knew the position and the direction of the train
mobile terminal and the best server footprint of the network we
could predict the next target cell for handover in advance. This
is possible as we can properly assume that the train - beside
train stations and railroad shunting yards - will not change its
direction by 180°.
At crossings this becomes more complicated. One approach
is in the planning phase. If you can manage to serve crossings
with one real omni-directional antenna there is no need to
determine the exact direction at the crossing because the next
handover occurs after the crossing where the direction will
become quite clear. The omni-directional serving can easily be
achieved as crossings in general are outside tunnels where you
can improve serving range by higher antenna sites to
compensate the lower gain of omni-directional antennas. If you
cannot manage to solve the problem at the planning stage your
movement prediction needs to be more complex [4].
B. Localization
But how to detect position and direction of a train / mobile
terminal for the general railway scenario? As soon as the
mobile terminal attaches to the network you know the actual
serving cell it is in. In a straight-line scenario you then have
only two neighbors. For the initial handover without any
further knowledge you will have to monitor this two cells and
take measurements to prepare the handover. This a first save of
time as there are only two neighbors compared to six stations
considered in the general case. After the initial handover you
can predict the direction of movement as you know the last and
the actual serving cell and U-turns are excluded. This puts you
into a position where you do not need a central location
detection and management entity. Each base station can predict
the next cell by comparing the identity of the cell that handed
the mobile station over with an internal look-up table provided
by the operator. This table and its check do not consume much
memory nor time because the general configuration is a base
station with two neighbors. As the maximum number of
neighbors we have seen implemented in real-life networks up
to now is 7 the table keeps small but the decision becomes
more complicated.
One chance to solve this is to make use of additional
localization systems. This will make the approach adoptable to
other types of networks [4, 5]. One solution that comes in mind
soon is GPS. This could easily be integrated into the train, but
as there are a lot of tunnels and train stations the visibility is
not good enough. But you can equip the train with a precise
incremental encoder that counts the distance by measuring the
way one wheel makes. You only have to initialize the system
properly. This is not the best solution as equipping all trains is
costly but it can be a work around for special trains until other
localization mechanisms are available. But as the additional
system is only needed for initial cell selection (see section II D)
the problems with the reselection process can be significantly
reduced with the built in measurement capabilities. Another
system giving additional location information consists of
balises that are foreseen for track equipped with ETCS anyway.
These transponders are mounted between the rails and give
signals to the trains passing them. This information is precise
enough for location detection as soon as there is at least one
balise in every cell.
In railway environment you have an additional choice. As
trains in general follow a schedule their route along the tracks
is known in advance. You could store this route in a memory
on the train after assembling it and devote it its train number or
you can store this information either in a multiple neighbor
base station or in a central network entity.
In the first case the mobile terminal needs to transmit its
preferred next cell to the network based on the serving cell
identity (and the last serving cell). In the second case it just
sends its train number with the measurement report that is still
sent every 480 ms for other network control reasons. The look-
up tables in the base station then get more complex as there is a
dedicated neighbor cell for each train number. In railway
stations this might become difficult. That is where the network-
stored information may become more economical depending
on the situation. We figured out that this is from a number of 5
trains and 3 directions. Here the signaling time is small
compared to the computational effort. The mobile switching
center also can take advantage of the information sent by
different mobile stations. This is not possible at the mobile
station nor at the base station to which only few mobile stations
send their data. The network-based approach is very
convincing in train stations where the additional delay of the
signaling with the network is not that critical, as trains cannot
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rush through large train stations where the problems with
multiple neighbors and multiple trains occur.
C. Handover Improvements
To speed up handover you have to identify the handover
phase that consumes most of the time and try to rearrange its
structure.
The actual handover execution is quite fast, but you can
fasten it if you set up the connections in the core network in
advance instead of setting them up while executing the
handover. This enables you to process the handover with
minimum delay. Of course you have to be careful with
reserving additional links in the core network, as there might be
a capacity restriction.
By assuming optical fiber connections between the core
network and the base stations we can show that at the first
stage of GSM-R deployment with no use of ETCS the traffic
keeps quite low as there is not that much data traffic. But [6]
shows that there will occur problems with ETCS deployment
anyway and that there are other capacity constraints. Thus, we
do not concentrate on the resource reservation problem now as
we suppose it has to be solved in a broader ETCS adjustment
process.
The handover decision itself - based on measurement data
from the mobile terminal and / or the base station - can be
implemented by each operator according to its special (railway)
needs. An easy way to choose is taking the cell with the best
field strength level in combination with a certain quality of
service requirement. There is not much time to save as long as
these algorithms do not become to complicate.
Where you can really save time is the handover initiation.
This is when mobile terminal and base station take
measurements. According to GSM standards [7] the
measurement reports are sent every 480 ms. This seems quite
fast, but as there is the need of averaging and processing
measurement data, more than 480 ms are needed. An other
problem is that the mobile terminal only starts handover
preparation (the search for an target cell) after it detected a bad
signal level. Then it starts cell reselection process (see section
II D). This consumes additional time up to 1 s.
This is where two of the new phase 2+ features conflict: the
higher speed and the GRM. GRM is a mixture of idle and
dedicated mode resulting in standards [8] for measurement
periods up to 15 s.
Real life tests have proven, that there are indeed problems
with handovers at a speed from 300 km/h on, thus, leading to
the need of handover improvement especially where high-
speed connections are planned or operated.
D. Cell Reselection
The cell selection / reselection itself, even when processed
without an ongoing connection, poses problems to the
operators. Thanks to the line topology of the network these
problems can be solved by the same mechanisms not
depending on the mobile terminal being in idle or connected
mode.
 This ensures that GRM call drops also occur less often and
that cell reselection can cope with the high-speed as we can
derive the next cell the mobile terminal will move into from the
former one with the help of knowledge of the tracks topology.
The measurements taken for cell reselection in idle mode are
the same as in handover procedure; they are only taken less
often.
Only for the first cell selection at power-up we cannot rely
on any measurements telling the last serving cell as a hint for
the mobile terminal's location. In this case to take advantage of
the network topology and the mobile terminal's location
network independent localization mechanisms have to be used.
III. SIMULATION ENVIRONMENT
As there is no nationwide deployed GSM-R network
where you can change parameters for test cases, as there is
real traffic on the tracks we simulated the different scenarios.
We categorize our simulation scenarios in three groups
(figure 3) and implemented them in percentages of scenarios A,
B and C that were derived from realistic values of European
railway environment.
A) Straight line with now crossings (about 75 %)
B) Simple crossings where two lines meet or intersect
(about 15 %)
C) Large crossings and inner-city (about 10 %)
The tracking was simulated with the following methods
based on the knowledge of Cell ID of the actual serving cell:
I) With neighbor lists only
II) With neighbor lists and schedules stored by train
number
Ila) At the train
Ilb) At the base station
lIc) At the mobile switching center
We investigated the time delay for the handover process
starting from taking measurements to evaluate the handover
conditions until the handover complete message is sent.
A straight line
(where j (scenario A) the next cell is selected in between 0 and Is.
not indicated else) C Especially in Group Receive Mode this is a major
B simple crossing B improvement. Thus, we can avoid a large amount of call drops
C large crossing
O base station
Figure 3. Network topology (extracted from simulation environment).
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0
cn 7
4
_~~~T
I
z 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Signaling overhead in %
.... Compared to knowledge of target cell without any calculation
-Compared to handover preparation with measurement reports
(measurement reports are still sent to evaluate the moment for handover)
Alla * B llb A C Ilc
Figure 4. Signaling overhead for cell prediction.
In this process we can save time by reducing or avoiding
measurements. For a straight-line scenario we can completely
omit measurements. For all other cases measurements can be
reduced widely. The reduction can be even increased by using
the train's schedules as additional information. The train's
number has not to be transmitted separately as it is already
know from the functional addressing. This avoids signaling
overhead. Some results for signaling overhead investigations in
typical combinations we depicted in figure 4. The other
combinations of scenarios and methods are not surprising and
are left aside for better readability.
With only one neighbor base station in the list it is assumed
that each network entity can predict the next cell without any
measurement. That means the next cell can be determined
before any signaling took place.
Part of the effects in figure 4 result from retransmission in
that cases where the base station could not extract the correct
Cell ID. As expected case A Ila has some signaling overhead
because the cell ID was explicitly sent in a separate message
after entering the new cell. If we assume that we can extract it
from the regular measurement report, the signaling overhead
decreases but we need some additional time to extract and store
the Cell ID from the measurements. Anyway the overhead is
that small that it plays no major role in delay calculation in any
scenario.
The time until the base station gets the first information
about the possible target cells is between 0 and 480 ms. The
last one is the time of periodic measurement reports in GSM.
0 ms can result from different cases: a measurement is sent just
at that moment or the base station derives the last serving cell
while handover procedure. Figure 5 shows the additional time
that is needed for deriving the next target cell from that
moment when the information about the last and the actual cell
is available at the base station.
The maximum time is about one GSM dedicated mode
measurement cycle (480 ms). That means in most of the cases
in GRM that were caused by collapse cell-reselection. But also
the high-speed handovers are improved.
 7 t 0
networks because of the line-shape of the tracks. Thus, a
+b
c

a) 6 location calculation precise enough to determine the next cell

m

0 5 can be calculated with minor time and computational power

=4
_M consumption. First simulations showed that most of the
c3 problems addressed could be solved by the proposed approach.
°2 _ . ) *E i _

We are still working to find out the best combination of

a .1
E '0 30 90 150 210 330 390
270 450 510 algorithms depending on the number of trains and tracks in one
z
Average additional time consumption in ms area.
*With neighbor lists only
With schedules stored by train number In parallel we are trying to adapt the approach to other than
* at the train (including transfer to base station) railway scenarios. We showed that the time saved could be
* at the base station
A at the mobile switching center (including transfer) used to add authentication into the handover process.

Figure 5. Time consumption of next ecll calculation. REFERENCES

The high-speed handover problems mainly occurred in
scenario A, only about 1 % took place in scenario B. The
simulation with method I could only improve handovers in
scenario A. This is, because we need additional information
about the direction of movement if there are more than 2
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"

neighbor cells. These problems could we solve by the use of
other localization techniques (see section II B). First
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IV. CONCLUSION
We identified several problems in railway communication
via GSM-R. Most of the problems occur in high-speed
environment. We identified that these problems come from bad
propagation circumstances together with the enhanced speed.
One way to cope with several problems simultaneously is
to make use of the location information. In the railway line
scenario the location can be guessed better than in wide-area
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[7] 3GPP, TS 05.08, V 8.15.0, Radio subsystem link control, June 2002.
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