Dynamic Green Communication Strategy for Railway Cellular Network

Green communication is ecological, economic and essential but seldom discussed in railway cellular network because safety is always the focus and has the highest priority. By analyzing the train scheduling and railway communication characteristics, we find that railway cellular network, especially for radio base station, has a big potentiality for energy saving to reduce carbon footprint without interrupting the safety rules. In this paper, we propose a simple train detection strategy by HANDOVER procedure under 3GPP specification. To implement this strategy under railway system model, we define cells' state along the railway. Then the cells are allocated to different orthogonal groups, which form a series of clusters identified by Finite states. A flexible and effective solution is designed based on mealy-type finite state machine to transit every cell between energy saving mode and full running mode. Our evaluation results show that a significant ratio, approximately up to 33% energy can be saved, by employing the configuration data for an actual high- speed railway line in China.