Assessment of channel propagation conditions for FDD LTE transmissions in the spanish high-speed railways

Railway and telecommunication companies have showed a great interest in deploying broadband mobile wireless networks in high-speed trains with the aim of supporting both provisioning of passenger services and automatic train control and signaling. This motivates the study of broadband wireless communications between a base-station transmitter and a mobile receiver whose antennas are placed on the top a high-speed train carriage. In this work, propagation measurements in a commercial high-speed line in Spain were carried out by employing standard-compliant Long Term Evolution (LTE) signals. The Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) values along the commercial line were measured and parameters characterizing the channel, such as the Power Delay Profile (PDP), were estimated. Finally, the bounds of the unconstrained capacity were also derived from different train velocities up to 200 km/h.