Mobile relays for enhanced broadband connectivity in high speed train systems

With the introduction of wireless modems and smart phones, the passenger transport industry is witnessing a high demand to ensure not only the safety of the trains, but also to provide users with Internet access all the time inside the train. When the Mobile Terminal (MT) communicates directly with the Base Station (BS), it will experience a severe degradation in the Quality of Service due to the path loss and shadowing effects as the wireless signal is traveling through the train. In this paper, we study the performance in the case of relays placed on top of each train car. In the proposed approach, these relays communicate with the cellular BS on one hand, and with the MTs inside the train cars on the other hand, using the Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular technology. A low complexity heuristic LTE radio resource management approach is proposed and compared to the Hungarian algorithm, both in the presence and absence of the relays. The presence of the relays is shown to lead to significant enhancements in the effective data rates of the MTs. In addition, the proposed resource management approach is shown to reach a performance close to the optimal Hungarian algorithm.