Channel Characteristics in Rural Railway Environment at 28 GHz

Nowadays, rail traffic is expected to evolve into a new era of "smart rail mobility", where trains, infrastructure, travelers and goods will be increasingly interconnected. Railway communications are required to support various high-data-rate applications, the communication system should be carefully designed, which makes railway scenario becomes an important communication scenario in the 5G era. Millimeter-wave (mmWave) bands and novel technologies like resource allocation, multiple access and multiple-output beam-forming are proposed in the realization of this goal. In this paper, the mmWave channel characteristics of rural railway scenario are studied via a calibrated ray-tracing simulator. The large-scale parameters of the channel characteristics, including the path loss, root-mean-square (RMS) delay spread, Rician K-factor, angular spreads, and cross-polarization ration (XPR) are explored. The statistical properties, decorrelation distance and cross-correlations are analyzed. The studied channel characteristics can be practically used to support the link level and system level design of the communication system in the similar environments.