Analysis on Applicability of LTE-R in Urban Railway Tunnel Environment

Abstract

-Unlike commercial LTE network, LTE-R railway network is arranged along a railroad track and the base stations of the network (RUs) are also installed on the waysides. For urban railway systems that are composed of underground tunnels, the leakage coaxial cables are widely used due to the radio propagation characteristics in tunnels. In theory, the tunnel sections are interpreted as the waveguide with blank spaces and for this reason, the tunnel sections are expected to be better than open ground sections in terms of the radio propagation characteristics. In this paper, we analyze the radio propagation characteristics based on this theory by replacing the leakage coaxial cables in the network with Yagi antennas. The test has been carried out in the 2.2km tunnel in the Daebul test track of KORAIL with 2.6GHz LTE-R Network. The LTE-R applicability in urban railways has been tested through the analysis on the radio propagation characteristics with the unmanned train operation system in Daebul tunnel.