Assessment of LTE-R Using High Speed Railway Channel Model

Long Term Evolution for Railway (LTE-R) is commonly believed to be the next generation wireless communication system for high speed railway. The main objective of this paper is to assess the performance of LTE-R under realistic conditions using a hybrid high speed railway channel model involving WINNER II Channel Model that was refined and validated using measurements made within the WP1 Channel Model work package in Europe, high speed train channel model in 3GPP and large-scaled models based on a group of measurements on Zhengzhou-Xian passenger dedicated line in China. The paper presents a detailed evaluation of the BER and PSD for LTE-R suitably dimensioned for the high speed railway channel. The investigation includes analysis of the Doppler shift caused by the velocity of transmitter and receiver, the multipath interference due to reflections and diffractions from terrains in the radio service coverage area, and other serious impairing factors. The results show that LTE-R has promising potential to be used in a high speed railway environment.