5G for Railways: the Next Generation Railway Dedicated Communications

TL;DR

This paper reviews the development and potential of 5G technology for railway communications, emphasizing its capabilities to enhance safety, capacity, and services in next-generation intelligent railways.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of 5G-R technology, including system configurations, key technologies, and application scenarios, highlighting its advantages over traditional railway communication systems.

Findings

5G-R can significantly improve railway communication capacity and reliability.

Key technologies like massive MIMO and millimeter-wave are crucial for 5G-R.

Challenges such as deployment and integration are identified.

Abstract

To overcome increasing traffic, provide various new services, further ensure safety and security, significantly improve travel comfort, a new communication system for railways is required. Since 2019, public networks have been evolving to the fifth generation communication (5G) worldwide, whereas the main communication system of railway is still based on the second generation communication (2G). It is thus necessary for railways to replace the current 2G-based technology with the next generation railway dedicated communication system with improved capacity and capability, and the 5G for railways (5G-R) technology is a promising solution for further intelligent railways. This article gives a review of the current developments of the next generation railway communications, followed by a discussion of the typical services that the 5G-R can provide to intelligent railways. Then, main application scenarios of 5G-R are summarized and system configurations are compared. Some key technologies of 5G-R such as network architecture, massive MIMO, millimeter-wave, multiple access scheme, ultra-reliable low latency communication, and advanced video processing are presented and analyzed. Finally, some challenges of 5G-R are highlighted.