Influence of Railway Infrastructure on Train-To-Train Communications

The future of railway operation will rely on train-to-train (T2T) communications. Hence, we investigate the propagation mechanisms based on channel sounding measurements and derive channel models for T2T communications. For every wireless communication, the environment significantly influences the wireless propagation. For railway environments, especially regular installed objects along track like overhead line masts cause pronounced multipath components (MPCs). In this paper, we analyze the MPCs from a T2T propagation measurement with two high speed trains. In detail, we extract the MPCs, identify the ones caused by overhead line masts and derive a distance-variant fading statistic for this kind of objects. Furthermore, we provide an outline on a T2T geometry-based stochastic channel model (GSCM) and how we incorporate the statistics of overhead line masts in the GSCM.