IP Impairment Models for Performance Evaluation of Wireless Systems in Railway Environments

Validation measurements for the Future Railway Communication System in railway environments is a very challenging task and should be reduced to a minimum for cost and time efficiency. "Zero-on-site testing" consists of using simulation/emulation tools and testing procedures to allow validation and verification activities in the laboratory to avoid complex and expensive trials with trains on real-world sites. A solution to test a communication network in a laboratory under realistic conditions consists of injecting perturbations at the IP level (such as additional delay, packet losses, or jitters). It is essential to correlate the IP impairments with the radio environment, their effects on end-to-end transmission, and how the network and its elements react. To do so, IP impairments (or the conditions that lead to them) should be generated in such a way that allows assessing their impact on the performance of transmissions. This paper presents the results of an experimental research based on an original emulation platform (Emulradio4Rail platform), able to emulate and test wireless systems taking into account both physical layer as well as IP traffic in realistic railway environments. Different types of IP traffics are injected at the application layer and go through the platform. The work aimed at extracting various statistical distributions of classical IP metrics (delay, packet loss, jitter, throughput) versus time, as a function of radio channel conditions for Wi-Fi and LTE transmissions in typical railway environments. Then, the modeled IP impairments statistical distributions can be considered at the IP level to test very easily wireless system modems. The results and methodology can be considered for the evaluation of the Future Railway Mobile Communication System modems.