111
GSM-R GLOBAL SYSTEM FOR MOBILE RADIO
C0MMUNICAl"S FOR RAILWAYS
H. Hofestadt
Siemens Transportation Systems
Germany
ABSTRACT
The paper describes general requirements of
European railways for a common universal mobile
radio system. The reasons for selecting the Global
System for Mobile Communications (GSM) as a
basis are discussed, as well as necessary exten-
sions to this standard to meet the railway require-
ments. The resulting GSM-R system offers new
services comparable to those of Private Mobile
Radio (PMR)
INTRODUCTION
Currently, European railways use different mobile
radio systems for various applications like train
radio for mobile track-to-train communications,
radio systems for shunting operations, and for
maintenance purposes. Moreover, even interna-
tionally standardised applications like train radio,
which has been standardised by the intemational
railway organisation the "Union International des
Chemins de Fer" (UIC), are oflen incompatible in
different countries.
Having in mind the EU directive on harmonisation
of European High-speed Railway Networks it
becomes clear that a unified mobile radio system
(with respect to both different applications and
countries) is needed. Such a new radio standard
must not only integrate current applications but
must also allow for more advanced services and
railway applications, like Automatic Train Control
(ATC), for example, currently being standardised
in the UIC project European Train Control Systems
(ETCS).
Railway authorities have realised that proprietary
systems are becoming increasingly expensive,
especially when there are only a few suppliers for
a country-specific radio system. Therefore, in
order to induce international competition, a new
radio system has to be based on a suitable, well
established and widely used standard. Possible
candidates have been identified to be the Global
System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and the
Electric Railways in a lltiited Europe, 27-30 March 1995
Conference Publication No. 405, @ IEE 1995.
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Trans-European Trunked Radio (TETRA) system.
Both are digital mobile radio standards issued by
the European Telecommunications Standards
Institute (ETSI).
In the view of railway requirements both have their
merits and shortcomings. Essentially, GSM is well
Group, established and has already proven technical and
economical viability in various countries all over
the world, whereas TETRA IS still in the standar-
disation process. On the other hand, the TETRA
standard offers PMR functionality which ISessen-
tial for railway operation. It is mainly because of
the availability of the GSM system that the UIC
decided in 1993 to use GSM as the future mobile
radio standard for railways.
Time scales for introducing the new radio will pro-
bably differ between the European countries.
German railways, for example, urgently need to
replace their train radio system for obsolescence
reasons alone. The most powerful driving force,
however, is the cost reduction potential offered by
radio based signalling. In 1990, therefore, German
railways initiated the national project Dienste-
infegrierender BahnmobiFununk (DIBMOF, Mobile
Radio for Railway Integrated Services) to investi-
gate options and approaches to consolidating
many communication functions within one digital
radio system
The present paper is organised as follows. First,
the railway requirements are discussed in some
detail. Then the necessary extensions of GSM to a
Global System for Mobile Communications for
Railways (GSM-R) are presented. Finally, a pos-
sible way towards this eventual goal is outlined.
RAILWAY REQUIREMENTS
As stated earlier a general requirementfor the new
radio standard is the ability to integrate all or most
of the current mobile radio applications of railways.
Instead of listing all the specific application
requirements we present and discuss them in the
following more generalised form:
vital railway applications, e.g.:
ATP, ATC
non-vital railway applications, e.g.:
train radio
shunting
maintenance
diagnosis
positioning systems
on-line passenger information
on-line reservation
 112
private passenger communications, e.g
voice communications
mobile data communications
FAX transmission
Requirements for vital applications
Controlling a fast moving train remotely from a
wayside control centre is obviously an example for
a vital application. It is generally a difficult task to
get approval for such a complex system. The
necessary level of confidence depends on the
specific railway authorities in the individual
countries.
It was realised early on that the classical %Me
box" approach to proving the vital operation of a
train control system is not applicable in case of
radio control links between trains and control
centres. Essentially, in this approach the integrity
of each bit of control information is proved along
the whole way from a control centre to a train, for
example.
Instead, the opposite approach is taken. The
whole communication path between a train and a
control centre including land lines, communication
nodes, and radio links is regarded as a "black box"
with no safety restrictions at all (1). The safety
requirements are met in this approach by suitable
end-to-end procedures based on cryptographical
methods for authentication and integrity of data.
These end-to-end procedures are supposed to run
in safe environments, e.g., voting computer
systems. This approach is currently being
standardised through the "Comitee Europeean de
Normalisationen Electrotechniclue" (CENELEC).
To summarise, the requirement placed on radio
due to vital applications is to provide a point-to-
point data link from a wayside control centre to
moving trains at speeds up to 500 kmlh. Both the
availability of such a link and its quality have to be
sufficiently high in order to prevent trains from
unwanted stops.
Requirements for non-vital applications
A major requirement for many non-vital appli-
cations is to provide point-to-point voice and data
links between mobile objects like trains and cars,
for example, and wayside controllers/computers
In addition to point-to-point voice and data
communications there IS a requirement for voice
group calls and emergency broadcast calls. These
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are well-known features of Private Mobile Radio
(PMR) systems used by emergency services and
police for example. The essential difference
between an emergency call and a group call is that
the former only allows the originator to speak. It
generally requires shorter call set-up times and a
priority scheme to pre-empt (terminate) on-going
calls if no free channel is available. The call setup
time must be such that at least an indication that
an emergency call has been initiated be provided
within a short period of time (approximately one
second). Group calls are currently used by
shunting and maintenance teams, for example.
Moreover, there are railway-specific addressing
requirements. Concerning the down-link case from
a wayside control centre to a moving train the
train registration data is used to set up a call by
dialling the running number of the train
independent of the locomotive which is currently
pulling the train. At the same time it must be
possible to call the locomotive of this particular
train by its stock number.
Concerning up-link calls, which are set up from a
moving train to wayside control centre, for
example, there is a general requirement for a
location-dependent addressing mechanism. In
case of an emergency, for example, the driver of a
train hits an emergency call button of his train
radio control panel which causes an automatic call
set-up to the local wayside controller (e.g. signal
man) in charge of that particular section.
Requirements for passenger communications
As more and more people get used to their private
GSM handsets, they will probably want to use it in
trains as well. This includes voice, fax, and mobile
data applications. Therefore, it is a requirement to
extend the coverage of public mobile networks to
trains.
THE GSM-R APPROACH
In this section the above railway requirements are
compared with available GSM services (including
Phase 2 services). If there is no such service
available suitable extensions to the GSM standard
are introduced and discussed.
It is, of course, preferable to introduce as few
modifications to GSM as possible. Moreover, all
necessary extensions have to be formulated as
generally as possible in order to open a broad
range of possible new applications to GSM not

necessarily confined to railway environments (e.g.
PMR features for fleet management applications).
This is the only practical approach to keep the
costs of modifications low and thereby make them
attractive to the GSM service providers.
The opposite approach of leaving GSM as it is and
introducing necessary features around the GSM
system has turned out to be only practicable as an
intermediate step towards an extended standard.
Necessary extensions to GSM which have been
identified as essential are currently being dis-
cussed and eventually standardised via ETSl in
GSM phase 2+. The aim is to have the final GSM-
R standard agreed by 1995. Most of the exten-
sions will be located in the Mobile Services
Switching Center (MSC), the Base Station
Controller (BSC), and the Mobile Stations (MS).
Figure 1 shows the principle structure of a GSM-R
system including wayside control centres for the
two applications Train Radio (TR) and Automatic
Train Control (ATC).
i'
Figure 1: GSM-R System Structure
High-speed Performance of GSM
GSM is specified for speeds up to 250 km/h. For-
tunately, this holds under multipath propagation
conditions as described by the Rayleigh model.
Various measurements performed in the DIBMOF
project have shown, however, that in typical rail-
way environments the direct path between trans-
ceiver and receiver is dominating, i.e. these envi-
ronments are strongly Rician with typical Rice
parameters in the order of 10 dB to 20 dB in
tunnels (5),(6).
Based on these measurements detailed link
srmulations have been performed (7) including
diversity schemes. A major conclusion is that
receiver diversity gives a significant gain and is
most effective in the Rician case. A trackside
signal to noise ratio of approximately 10 dB
without diversity should provide for adequate GSM
link performance up to 500 kmlh.
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113
A further problem due to high-speed operation is
the performance of a handover between cells.
Using standard algorithms, a large overlap
between cells would be necessary. These
problems can be overcome by introducing
dedicated handover algorithms which take into
account that the path of a train is predetermined.
Automatic Train Control based on GSM
In case of high-speed trains, tracks are usually
almost a straight line; i.e. it is just a matter of
sufficient infrastructure (base stations) to realise a
Rician environment. This forms the basis for
providing highly available GSM radio links to
trains. As stated earlier the radio link does not
need to be regarded as a vital component
German railway authorities have decided to use a
standard Bearer Service (BS24) providing '2400 Bit
per second for automatic train control purposes.
For each train a pennanent radio link is
1 established between the train and a wayside
control centre. For efficiency reasons half-rate
channels will be used for this purpose as soon as
available.
In order to guarantee that a radio channel for ATC
is available in the next radio cell during handover
either sufficient network capacity or a priority
scheme has to be provided, and will be described
in a later section.
Non-vital applications based on GSM
As GSM is essentially made for point-to-point
communications all categories of point-to-point
railway communication requirements can be real-
ised in a straight forward manner. Useful services
are, for example, the teleservices Telephony, vari-
ous Short Message Services, and fax group 3
services. For data communications various Bearer
Services with data speeds between 2400 and
9600 Bit per second are available (8).Additionally,
in GSM phase 2+ a General Packet Radio Service
(GPRS) will be available which is more efficient for
many applications.
However, the missing PMR functionality of GSM
causes problems with voice group calls and emer-
gency calls for example. In principle, a group call
could be emulated by the GSM Multiparty Service.
This is, however, a time consuming method: one
must first establish a point-to-point communication,
put it on hold to establish a second call, and then
set up a conference. The process can be repeated
 114
so that up to 5 communications can be merged by
the originator (8). It is immediately clear that a
more efficient method is required.
Within the ad hoc working group on UIC issues in
ETSl a general group call extension to GSM is
being discussed (4). Essentially, for a group call a
single traffic channel per cell is dynamically
allocated. Paging messages containing the actual
channel number for the particular group call are
sent to all mobiles. Handovers have to be initiated
by the mobile stations in contrast to standard GSM
where this is done by the wayside GSM
infrastructure.
As mentioned earlier a priority scheme is required
to be invoked at call set-up and handover but,
unfortunately, is not available in standard GSM. Its
purpose is to pre-empt (terminate) ongoing calls of
lower priority to make resources available for a
higher priority call. It is intended to provide 8
different priority levels in GSM-R. Most of these
extensions will be located in the MSC and BSC.
Concerning the fast call set-up requirement,
standard GSM has to be improved as well. Even if
the authentication procedure is switched off, call
set-up times are still too long. Therefore, a direct
assignment procedure for mobile terminated calls
has been suggested to ETSl which speeds up the
assignment process for this kind of calls. The
principle is to allocate a down-link channel in all
cells were the mobile might reside followed by a
paging message to instruct the mobile stations
accordingly.
Meeting the addressing requirements
For calling a train under its running number there
are two promising solutions.
The first solution is to enter dummy entries for all
running numbers into the Home Location Register
(HLR). The HLR essentially is a huge database
holding subscriber information like current
location, for example. These dummy entries point
to real Mobile Station ISDN numbers (MSISDN) of
the mobile stations on the corresponding trains.
The pointers can be set remately from a mobile
station via remote operations through the
Operation and Maintenance Centre (OMC) of the
MSC. Alternatively, the redirection in the HLR can
be done using the Unstructured Supplementary
Service Data (USSD) service of GSM. Moderate
changes to the MSC software are necessary for
this purpose.
The second solution is to use the "follow me"
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feature of Intelligent Network (IN) systems which
could be provided externally to the GSM system.
This solution would not require any changes to the
GSM system.
The location dependent addressing of a wayside
terminal (e.g. calling the local signalman) from a
moving train can be reaiised in various ways. The
most promising one is to use a cell-specific routing
depending on the identifier of the cell where the
train is currently located. This feature is already
available in some MSCs. Depending on the cell
identifier either the routing to the final destination
can be performed automatically, if it is unique, or a
set of possible destinations can be retrieved from
an MSC database and transmitted to the mobile
station on the train.
Meeting passenger communication
requirements
The easiest way to meet the passenger communi-
cations requirements is to make public mobile
networks available by equipping trains with
repeaters. Measurements in trains at 200 kmh
have shown that this is a possible simple solution.
GSM-R frequency band allocation
The "Conference Europeene des Administrations
des Postes et des Telecommuniactions" (CEPT)
has assigned a dedicated frequency band for UIC
GSM-R applications. This UIC band ranges from
870 - 874 MHz (up-link) and 915 - 919 (downlink).
However, this specific allocation causes significant
problems because in this case there is no guard
band between the standard GSM up-link band
(890 - 915 MHz) and the UIC down-link band.
Therefore, it has been suggested to move the UIC
band by 6 MHz to higher frequencies (876 880 -
-
MHz up-link, and 921 925 MHz down-link) which
would give the desired guard band. An additional
advantage with this allocation is that the UIC band
would be adjacent to the GSM extension band
-
(880 - 890 MHz and 925 935 MHz). In Germany
for trials and pilot projects this frequency band will
probably be used.
The way towards GSM-R systems
As mentioned earlier the aim is to have the GSM-R
standard agreed upon in 1995. It then remains to
implement these features which will probably take
 115

at least one or two years. However, since many Manor Research for their contributions to the
applications, e.g. all point-to-point applications can presented work. The collaboration with the
be realised using standard GSM several trials and Deutsche Bahn AG and other DIBMOF partners is
pilot projects will take place before the full GSM-R gratefully acknowledged as is the partial funding of
standard is available. the presented work by the German Ministry for
Research and Technology (BMFT, Bundes-
For the DIBMOF trial in Germany, for example, ministerium fur Forschung und Technologie) and
outfitting of the trackside from Stuttgart to Bruchsal the City Administration of Berlin (Berliner Senat).
with GSM infrastructure will start at the end of
1994. The length of the track is approximately 60
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Siemens Transportation

Systems Ltd., Siemens Mobile Networks and Roke

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