Mobile relays for urban rail transportation systems

Assuring an uninterrupted high Quality of Service (QoS) of railway communications between on-board terminals and base stations creates challenges for the provider. This is partly explained by the inherent mobility and the high penetration loss of carriages. Deploying mobile relays in public transportation is possible with a 100%-compatible LTE/EPC architecture. This effectively ensures that the electromagnetic insulation is kept to a minimum as QoS on board can be dramatically affected and worsened within the railway vehicles. Yet all users’ traffic congregates via the radio backhaul link and needs to take into consideration the extra packet-overhead and signaling messages that as a general rule get transmitted via the fixed links. The paper’s aim is to analyze the performance of mobile relays in loaded conditions comparing this to the standard direct mode. We propose an analytical model to compute the signaling rate. We parametrize it with experiments done on a testbed with real radio transmissions and show that signaling has no major impact on performance. We then evaluate the QoS experienced by passengers by means of simulations for two representative services: Web browsing and voice communications. The packet loss ratio for voice communications is reduced at the expense of a slight end-to-end latency increase thanks to mobile relays. During the high load conditions there is a significant reduction in the load time of a Web page and the throughput is increased.