Determination of Cell Coverage Area and its Applications in High-Speed Railway Environments

In this paper, a determination method of the cell coverage area for the narrow-strip-shaped cells in high-speed railways (HSRs) is proposed, which is of great importance to HSR dedicated communication network planning. A closed-form expression for the cell coverage area is first derived on the basis of the edge outage probability and the propagation channel parameters, and it is found that the linear coverage in HSRs has a higher percentage of coverage area than the traditional circular coverage of cellular systems. For the convenience of link budget computation, we also present a family of curves related with the percentage of linear coverage. Then, the implementation of the proposed determination of cell coverage area is presented, and it is found that the linear cell of HSRs has a larger maximum communication distance than circular coverage. Furthermore, the impact of frequency on the HSR link budget is investigated, and the results show that a lower frequency band reduces the number of the required base stations. The results can be used in designing and optimizing the wireless coverage and the communication network planning of HSR communications.