Railway Cognitive Radio

Wireless communication plays a vital role in the success of railroad operations. This article describes an effort toward developing a railroad-specific cognitive radio (rail-CR) that can meet the needs of future wireless communication systems for railways by making positive train control (PTC) communication more interoperable, robust, reliable, spectrally efficient, and less costly to deploy and maintain. Cognitive radios (CRs) are a cutting-edge research area that combines artificial intelligence (AI) with software-defined radios (SDRs) with the goal of improving upon existing radio performance. SDRs are radios in which capabilities are flexible because of realizing some functionality in software as opposed to a purely hardware platform. By using situational awareness from the radio in the form of observable parameters, often known as meters, a cognitive engine (CE) uses software-based decision-making and learning algorithms to determine whether a change in the radio parameters, commonly referred to as knobs, is required based on sets of predefined goals.