Future railway services-oriented mobile communications network

The future development of the railway is highly desired to evolve into a new era where infrastructure, trains, travelers, and goods will be increasingly interconnected to provide high comfort, with optimized door-to-door mobility at higher safety. For this vision, it is required to realize seamless high data rate wireless connectivity for railways. To improve the safety and comfort of future railways, wireless communications for railways are required to evolve from only voice and traditional train control signaling services to various high data rate services including critical high-definition (HD) video and other more bandwidth-intensive passenger services, such as onboard and wayside HD video surveillance, onboard real-time high data rate services, train multimedia dispatching video streaming, railway mobile ticketing, and the Internet of Things for railways. Corresponding mobile communications network architecture under various railway scenarios including inter-car, intra-car, inside station, train-to-infrastructure and infrastructure-to-infrastructure are proposed in this article. Wireless coverage based on massive MIMO for railway stations and train cars is proposed to fulfill the requirement of high-data-rate and high spectrum efficiency. The technical challenges brought by the massive MIMO technique are discussed as well. © 2015 IEEE.