COgnitive Radio for RaIlway through Dynamic and Opportunistic spectrum Reuse – CORRIDOR

To increase quality, reliability, safety and security of Railway systems while increasing accessibility and productivity, modern railway operations rely on ever increasing fluxes of information between operators’ staff workstations, central databases and also field devices widely distributed both by the trackside and on board the train. There is no single technology or standard that is universal enough to replace all the other ones while being able to support the multitude of usages and needs at the same time. As a consequence, a lot of wireless communication devices operating at different frequencies are widely deployed to address the particular needs for a railway function in a given context. The integration of all these heterogeneous wireless networks is therefore a key technical challenge to improve global efficiency of railway system. This can be answered by emerging Cognitive Radio (CR) technologies which are able to meet the needs of future wireless communication devices: interoperability, robustness, reliability, spectral efficiency, and lower deployment and maintenance costs.

The CORRIDOR project is the first basic research project in Europe that will open the road for the development of CR technologies for Railway applications. The objectives are to design, develop and evaluate the bricks of a CR system adapted to high speed railway needs and constraints (high speed, EM disturbances and poor coverage of systems in rural areas, etc.). The possibility of using temporarily available spectrum resources with specific waveforms, without perturbing other users will be also investigated in the context of the future dynamic spectrum allocations between systems.

The project intends to design, develop and evaluate, in real high speed railway conditions, innovative communication-interface solutions for vehicles/infrastructures, taking into account three characteristic types of usages (control-command, CCTV and Internet on board) in order to propose a better transport offer. The development of CR systems will also clearly contribute to propose novel and efficient solutions for robust communications related to transport security (with the CCTV case studied in the project). CR technologies for Railways will contribute to improve the mobility of persons and goods and to the development of transport system components which are more reliable in terms of the applications, integrating information and communication technologies.

In the CORRIDOR project, railways users’ needs will be translated into technical system requirements regarding CR properties before the definition of the system to be developed. Channel characterization and spectrum sensing will be performed along the high speed trial site with SNCF trains, in order to obtain real signals for the design and the evaluation of the different bricks of the CR system. The implementation and evaluation phases will be conducted in labs on the OpenAir Interface platform before system evaluation on high speed trains with the same platforms. The project will consider not only the "lower layer" aspects of CR, but also the interaction of CR with upper communication layers and the integration of the latter in a CR-oriented architecture. Dissemination actions are planned for the duration of the project, and recommendations for a future CR system for railways will be done at the end of the project.