GSM-R Radio Network Planning and Dimensioning for ISAKA-KIGALI Railway Line
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Date
2019-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Railway Control and Communication system is the heart of safe and reliable railway
operations. From the very birth of railway operations up to now, railways have encountered
challenges in operations mainly accidents due to head to head collision for trains moving in
opposite directions on a same track and rear-end collision in case a train hits the one in front
due to high speed and not enough breaking power as a result of lack of efficient
communication and train control system. Besides this, railway capacity optimization which
involves use of maximum number of trains on a track in given time period also requires
efficient communication and control for train dispatching. Different means for train control
and communication have been used such as Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA), Global
System for Mobile Communication – Railway (GSM-R), Enhanced position and location
reporting system (EPLRS), inductive loop, satellite, and the current trend of Long Term
Evolution – Railway (LTE-R).
This thesis project focuses on planning a GSM-R radio communication network for ISAKAKIGALI
Railway line. GSM-R has been chosen due to its several advantages such as being
the first international communication network designed specifically for railways; GSM-R has
been proven to maintain a reliable communication link between the train and the ground;
GSM-R has a great experience of nearly 3 decades which shows its maturity as a
communication and control system for trains and the last but not the least, GSM-R is at the
heart of European Train Control System Level 3(ETCS-3) which implements a moving block
technology. Network coverage planning and dimensioning is carried in three phases which
are technical analysis of elements causing traffic on the network for network dimensioning,
calculation of important parameters for Base Transceiver Station (BTS) deployment and
network simulation in Atoll software to calculate the number of BTSs required providing
radio coverage for the entire line. The obtained results are that a total of 92 BTSs are required
to provide a fully redundant GSM-R network whereby each cell’s BTS is assigned a single
frequency channel except at Major station and other medium stations where more than one
frequency channel is required due to high telecommunication traffics taking place there, and
the network has to be able to support a total traffic intensity of 7.54Mbps in busy hour.
Coverage in tunnels is chosen to use leaky feeders connected to BTS adjacent to tunnel entry.
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Keywords
GSM-R, Radio Network Planning, ISAKA-KIGALI Railway line