Abstract
As a widely acknowledged efficient and green transportation model, rail traffic is expected to evolve into a new era of “smart rail mobility” where infrastructure, trains, and travelers will be interconnected to achieve optimized mobility, higher safety, and lower costs. Thus, a seamless high-data rate wireless connectivity with up to dozens of GHz bandwidth is required. Such a huge bandwidth requirement motivates the exploration of the underutilized millimeter (mm) wave and terahertz (THz) bands. In this chapter, the motivations of developing mmWave and THz communications for railway are clarified by first defining the applications and scenarios required for smart rail mobility. Then, the wireless channel in one “smart rail mobility” scenario—the intra-wagon scenario—is characterized through ultra-wideband (UWB) channel sounding and ray-tracing at mmWave and THz bands. Moreover, the train-to-infrastructure (T2I) inside-station channel is measured, simulated, and characterized at the THz band for the first time. All parameters are fed into and verified by the 3GPP-like quasi-deterministic radio channel generator (QuaDRiGa). This can provide the foundation for future work that aims to add the smart rail mobility scenario into the standard channel model families and, furthermore, provides a baseline for system design and evaluation of THz communications. Finally, we point out the future directions toward the full version of the smart rail mobility which will be powered by THz communications.
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Guan, K., Ai, B. (2022). Smart Rail Mobility. In: Kürner, T., Mittleman, D.M., Nagatsuma, T. (eds) THz Communications. Springer Series in Optical Sciences, vol 234. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73738-2_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73738-2_13
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