Increasing Cellular Network Energy Efficiency for Railway Corridors

TL;DR

This paper proposes a sustainable cellular corridor solution for railways by deploying fewer high-power units and low-power repeaters with sleep modes, significantly reducing energy consumption while maintaining data capacity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel deployment strategy combining high-power and low-power repeaters with sleep modes to enhance energy efficiency in railway cellular networks.

Findings

Repeaters consume only 5% of traditional cell site energy

The proposed system maintains data capacity with fewer high-power sites

Sleep mode enables solar powering and easier installation

Abstract

Modern trains act as Faraday cages making it challenging to provide high cellular data capacities to passengers. A solution is the deployment of linear cells along railway tracks, forming a cellular corridor. To provide a sufficiently high data capacity, many cell sites need to be installed at regular distances. However, such cellular corridors with high power sites in short distance intervals are not sustainable due to the infrastructure power consumption. To render railway connectivity more sustainable, we propose to deploy fewer high-power radio units with intermediate low-power support repeater nodes. We show that these repeaters consume only 5 % of the energy of a regular cell site and help to maintain the same data capacity in the trains. In a further step, we introduce a sleep mode for the repeater nodes that enables autonomous solar powering and even eases installation because no cables to the relays are needed.