MSCA-COFUND-CLEAR-Doc - PhD Position #CD22-06: Development of realistic interference models for current and future radio technologies in Road and Rail domains

The needs for the development of sustainable and smart cities required highly available public transportation. In the same time, there is an increase on the demands for individual transport too. To address these demands in urban areas, intelligent transportation systems (ITS) aim at increasing capacity and safety while reducing costs, accidents, and environmental impact. To that end, both the railway and the automotive industries focus on automation, digitization, and wireless communications to cope with increasing numbers of vehicles and passengers. In a necessary context of resources and energy saving, it is crucial to analyze the possibility of coexistence and synergies between Road and Rail communication systems. Both systems rely on cooperative ITS (C-ITS) communicating in the same frequency band (5.9 GHz). Without appropriate measures, interference between the different radio technologies must be assumed and reliable communication for safety-critical applications cannot be guaranteed. In this context, it is also important to anticipate the different evolution of the rail and road communication systems. The multi bearer characteristics of the future FRMCS (Future Railway Mobile Communication System) under development for all types of trains [Allen18], [ETSI-Rail], and the work on going considering 5G NR and beyond technologies [ETSI-Road], [Maal21] should be considered.

In the automotive and rail domains, vehicles are entering the era of full automation thanks to wireless sensors and communication systems shifting control functions from the human driver to computers. High data rate, robustness, high reliability and ultra-low latency are required for the wireless communications in the context of autonomous train and safety critical applications. Driverless tramways and trains running in the middle of driverless cars will be among the possible scenarios. In order to anticipate this era of full automation that will increase possible interferences between road and rail systems it is urgent to develop accurate and realistic interference models for current and future radio technologies in order to take into account these coexistence and sharing scenarios in the performance evaluation of new systems.

DLR has conducted an intensive measurement campaign in 2021 in critical Rail and road environments considering several characteristic scenarios and existing systems such as ITS-G5, cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X), and 802.11a wireless communication systems. In addition, DLR employed a technology independent channel sounder radio system on the interfering link between road and rail vehicles enabling the development of interference models for future 5G and 6G V2X communication systems. An initial data analysis shows that adjacent channel interference can cause severe performance degradation on urban rail C-ITS if generated in line-of-sight (LOS) to the train with a significant number of interfering signals [Sand21].

Based on this available precious data basis shared between DLR and Université Gustave Eiffel, the objectives of the PhD work is to extract all the statistical information to develop suitable mathematical interference models to be considered in the performance evaluation at system level. The existence of the data basis will allow the PhD work to start immediately avoiding risk related to measurements to be able to obtained results within the 3 years duration of the thesis. Different types of mathematical interference models will be set up and they can be injected then into system level performance evaluation to evaluate the effect on the wireless systems [Berb21] and the consequences in term of safety. As far as we know such type of models do not exist yet. The work will be conducted at Vehicular Applications Group of the Institute of Communications and Navigation of DLR in Wessling and at COSYS/LEOST laboratory in Lille. Both laboratories have RF test platforms and are able to carry out new measurements if required also in the domain of high frequencies.

[Allen18] B. Allen, et al., “Defining an Adaptable Communications System for all railways”, 7th Transport Research Arena TRA 2018, Vienna, 16-19 April 2018

[ETSI-V2X] ETSI, “Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS); LTE-V2X Access layer specification for Intelligent Transport Systems operating in the 5 GHz frequency band,” ETSI EN 303 613 V1.1.1, pp. 1–20, Jan. 2020.

[Maal21] S. Maaloul et al., "Classification of C-ITS Services in Vehicular Environments," in IEEE Access, vol. 9, pp. 117868-117879, 2021, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3105815.

[ETSI-Rail] ETSI, “Rail Telecommunications (RT); Future Rail Mobile Communi-cation System (FRMCS); Study on system architecture,” ETSI TR 103 459 V1.2.1, pp. 1–73, Aug. 2020.

[Sand21] Stephan Sand & al., “Radio Interference Measurements for Urban Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems”, xxxx

[Berb21] M. Berbineau et al., "Channel Models for Performance Evaluation of Wireless Systems in Railway Environments," in IEEE Access, vol. 9, pp. 45903-45918, 2021, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3066112.