Problem
In railways range appears to be increasingly important to provide the trains of a wireless link reliable broadband with the aim to realize various services:
- updating of train multimedia contents
- software upgrade or modification of configuration files
- tele diagnosis
- passengers connectivity on board
Path
Existing radio technologies have been analyzed. Because of the pressing technological requirements, none of these has proved to be suitable: WiMax contrasts with the requirement of network ownership and does not guarantee coverage in tunnel sections; WiFi (IEEE802.11 a/b/g) does not guarantee adequate connection speeds due to the handshake and the physical layer is not defined in a manner consistent to the external environment and the mobile nature. Other solutions compatible with existing standards have been discarded due to low coverage or to low communication speed.
Other solutions which were compatible with existing standards have been rejected due to low coverage or low communication speed.
Solution
It was designed a radio transceiver capable of supporting different communication standards. For this reason it has been adopted the typical architecture of the Software Defined Radio (SDR) solutions. Based on this platform, the communication system is able to provide a communication link reliable even in the presence of particular environments and problematic. The proposed solution has anticipated the modern solutions that have been made available on the market only since 2010 (some years later) such as IEEE802.11p/n and IEEE802.11s.