7. Security of Dedicated Mobile Communications for Railway

In this chapter covers security schemes of dedicated mobile communications for railway. Due to the control signal is transmitted via wireless channel, communication security is crucial to the whole rail transit system. Although currently the mobile communication infrastructure in railway is based on public cellular mobile communications, considering the rail transit has characteristics of ultra-high moving velocity and high reliability and safety demand, traditional security mechanism is unable to satisfy the basic requirements of the rail transit scenario. On the one hand, there are still some threats remained in GSM-R. On the other hand, the future dedicated mobile network for railway is heterogeneous and complicated, including 2G, 3G, 4G, WLAN networks, and mobile relays. How to achieve fast authentic handover scheme across domains is a problem that must be solved. In this chapter, we first introduce the security problems in mobile communications. Next, we describe in detail the key improvements of railway communication technology. Finally, we introduce some key technologies in heterogeneous network environment and give a brief prospect of the future research.