International conference on Communication and Signal Processing, April 3-5, 2013, India

978-1-4673-4866-9/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE

AbstractIn this article, we present the performance of an
automated train transit system using radars and a Geo stationary
satellite. The Radars placed along the railway tracks update the
accurate speed and position of the train to the central base
station which controls the trains over a wide geographic region.
The central base station directs the train by communicating via a
Geo stationary satellite. The proposed system model does not
require visible signaling for trains. It also eliminates the
possibility of a collision between two trains. Further, the use of
multiple radars ensures that system doesnt fail, even if any of the
radar fails. Our performance study shows that the effect of rain
on the satellite link requires at least a 5dB additional signal to
noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver to maintain the same bit error
rate (BER).

Index TermsAutomation, collision detection, link budget,
EIRP, radar, radio frequency performance, satellite
communication, train, transit system
I. INTRODUCTION
HE public transportation system is gaining its reputation
in the recent past, among the commuters even in the
developed countries owing to its convenience such as fast
transportation in the metro areas without any traffic jam, zero
car parking problems in crowded downtown areas etc. The
public transportation system especially long distance
passenger trains and light rails are the most effective energy
efficient mode of transportation. Since, they handle a huge
amount of passenger traffic, ensuring safety and timekeeping
are very critical for the success of a public transit system
[1].This necessitates an intelligent public transportation
system [2] which can ensure safety and at the same time which
can help people reach their destinations on time. It is observed
that most of the train accidents occur due to improper
communication. Introducing better communication systems
helps in drastically reducing the number of accidents, and also
assist passengers reach their destination on time. They can
also bring down the maintenance costs of the overall system,
making it economical [3].
The present railway systems use visible light signals, lack
tracking devices and needs more human efforts. There is a
high possibility of a collision between two trains if there is a
delay in communication among them. Also there is no
automatic emergency braking system (AEBS) and it becomes

The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, University
of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75252, USA. (E-mail:
shivram.salemarunachalam@utdallas.edu, mxg1262301@utdallas.edu,
bxk122330@utdallas.edu).

very difficult to identify if the loco pilot speeds beyond the
speed limit specified for a railway track. This may possibly
increase the chances of a collision or a derail resulting in a
heavy loss. According to [4] it has been observed that 63% of
the railway accidents occur due to manual errors. So,
automating the railway system will significantly reduce the
number of railway accidents.
In [5] the idea of communication based train control
(CBTC) has been discussed. But the problem with the CBTC
is its high maintenance cost. In [6] the use of satellites is
considered as a possible solution to communicate control
information to the trains. In [7] a multicarrier system for
satellite based communications in railway environments has
been presented. However, the complexity increases
considerably in this case. Alternatively, the use of radar for
railway applications has been suggested in [8].Since radars
can accurately detect the speed of the moving train, this
information can be used to eliminate completely collision
between the trains. However, the use of radar alone cannot
ensure automation of the system completely. An effective
autonomous approach for train control using a central base
station (CBS) has been briefed in [9]. The main idea of this
approach is to find out the location of the train as well as the
speed of the train and providing control signals accordingly.
Motivated by the above ideas, in this paper, we discuss the
performance of a radar assisted satellite based navigation
system for trains.
Radars can be used as an alternative to the traditional
visible light signals owing to the fact that, it can penetrate
better even under undesirable weather conditions. The radars,
unlike the visible light signals can also be used to calculate the
speed of the vehicle approaching/moving away from it.
Further, we can know the position of the train from the signal
captured by the radar. This radar information can serve the
purpose to find out whether the train is speeding or not.
The use of the satellite is to communicate the information
sent by the central base station to the train. A geo-stationary
satellite is employed in our scenario, which has wide
geographical area coverage and can be deployed to take care
of the entire railway network of the country. When the train
receives the signal from the satellite, it varies its speed
accordingly. The base station can monitor this change from
the information given to it by the radars.
The rest of the correspondence is organized as follows.
Section II provides the system model and section III provides
the RF block description of the system. In section IV the
Performance of Radar assisted Satellite based
Automated Train Transit system
Shivram S Arunachalam, Medini Guruprasad, Bhavana Koti
T
758



mathematical modeling is discussed and in section V
performance results are illustrated. In section VI conclusions
are drawn.
II. SYSTEM MODEL
Figure 1 shows the schematic of a radar assisted satellite
based train transit system. Here, we assume that the system
consists of multiple radars placed along the railway tracks of
the entire railway network. These radars continuously send out
a beam of radio waves at a particular frequency/wavelength
and receive the reflected signals from the target. When a
moving train approaches the radar transceiver, it detects a
change in the frequency due to the Doppler Effect. This
Doppler shift is used to calculate the speed of the moving
vehicle and this information containing the speed of the
vehicle and position of the train is sent to central base station
using the traditional wired link.



The central base station receives the information from the
radars and processes them. It checks for a possibility of a
collision, checks whether the train is over speeding, calculates
the time taken by the train to reach the destination etc. This
information from the central base station is sent to the geo-
stationary satellite using a satellite transmitter. The satellite
transponder reflects the signal back to the satellite receivers
mounted on the trains. The train on receiving this signal acts
accordingly by varying its speed.
The radar sub system comprises of radar guns which are
capable of directing the radio waves into a narrow beam. It is
operated in K band, 23.7GHz, the band in which the
commercial radar works. The maximum range of these radars
are about 80 meters with a low transmit power of around
25dBm.The number of radars placed over the railway track
depends on the accuracy we need to track and control the
trains. Accordingly, the range of radar can be adjusted. It is
recommended that the radars are placed close enough that,
even if one of the radar fails the next consecutive radar can
pick up the information about the train, so that, the train does
not go unmonitored for a long time.
The satellite subsystem is designed to operate over the
traditional Ku band. The uplink frequency of 14-14.5GHz and
downlink frequencies of 11.7-12.75 GHz are chosen for
communicating with the geo stationary satellite. The transmit
antenna used for the uplink is the 2.4 m wide parabolic dish
type antesky earth station antenna [10]. Speed ray antenna
[11] is used at the train end receivers. The speed ray antenna
uses Global Positioning System (GPS) to locate its position
first and later uses this information to steer the beam towards
the satellite using the phased array panels. This antenna can
support communication at very high speeds up to 350km/hr.
III. BLOCK SPECIFICATIONS
Figure 2 demonstrates the RF block components of the
radar transceiver. The radar transmitter consists of a tone
generator which is amplified by an intermediate frequency
(IF) amplifier of 15dB gain before passing it through a low
pass filter. The filtered signal is upconverted to RF
frequencies using a mixer with a 10dB conversion loss. The
output from the mixer is then allowed to pass through a band
pass filter (23.6-24GHz) to filter out unwanted harmonics.
Finally the signal is amplified using a power amplifier (gain
23dB) and transmitted through a directional antenna.





The radar receiver receives the reflected signals from the
moving object through the antenna and amplifies it using a
Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) of Noise Figure (NF) = 2.2dB.
The output of the LNA is filtered using a band pass filter to
remove out of band noise. This band filtered output is down
converted using a mixer operating in difference mode and the
base band signal is allowed to pass through a low pass filter.
The filtered output is amplified by an IF amplifier and the
output is observed for a Doppler shift. From the Doppler shift
the velocity of the moving vehicle,: is calculated using,
: =
c]
d
2]
t
(1)
where
d
is the doppler shift,
t
is the transmit frequency and c
is the velocity of light in free space or vacuum.
Figure1: System Model
Figure 2: Block diagram of a RADAR transceiver
759







The information from the base station is modulated using
the base band modulator and then allowed to pass through an
IF amplifier. This IF signal is upconverted to the
corresponding RF signal, amplified and transmitted towards
the direction of the geo-stationary satellite using a directional
antenna.
The signal from the satellite is received by the train-end
satellite receiver and amplified using an LNA (NF=0.8dB). It
is then filtered using a band pass filter. It is further down
converted and allowed to pass through a low pass filter.
Finally it is demodulated to retrieve back the original signal.
IV. MATHEMATICAL MODELING
Let x be the signal vector from the base station to the
satellite given by
x = |
x
1
x
2
x
t] (1)
where x
1
,x
2
x
t
be the transmitted sequences in time t at a
transmit power of P
1
.Let H be the channel matrix, where the
entries of H matrix are independent and identically distributed
with uniform phase and normalized Rician magnitude, since
there exists a dominant line of sight (LOS) between the
transmitter and the receiver [11]. The received signal vector y
corresponding to a i
th
receiver is given by
y

= H

+ H
k
x
k k=
+n
|
(2)
where H

is the desired signal and H

k
x
k k=
is signals
corresponding to other satellite receivers. However, its effect
on the desired signal is very minimal and negligible because
of the narrow pencil beam steered by the directional antennas
at the receivers. n

represents the additive white Gaussian

noise (AWGN) with zero mean and unit variance.
When the channel state information (CSI) is known at the
receiver end, the recovered signal at the receiver is given by,
r

= H

+H

H
k
x
k k=
+H

n
|
(3)
where H

is the pseudo inverse of the channel matrix H

.A
maximum likelihood (ML) detector is used at the receiver end
for detection.
The link budget of the satellite system is calculated using
the free space path loss model from the Friis transmission
equation [12] given by,
P
R
= P
t
0
t
0

[
x
4n

2
(4)
where P
R
is the received signal power, 0
t
and 0

are the gain

of the transmit and receive antennas respectively, z is the
wavelength and r is the distance between the transmitter and
the receiver. Further, the effect of rain is modeled to be a
fading with a standard deviation of 3dB.
V. PERFORMANCE RESULTS
In this section, we present the performance of a RADAR
assisted satellite based train transit system. Table I illustrates
the parameters considered for the analysis of a radar.





Figure 4 shows the power spectral density at the output of a
RADAR transmitter operating at 23.7GHz on the K-band. The
maximum range of the radar at a transmit power of 23.8 dBm
is calculated to be 78.5m.




Figure 5 shows the yield analysis of a cascaded 1 dB
compression point (p1dB) performance of the radar
transmitter observed over 1000 iterations with a maximum
Figure 3: Block diagram of a satellite transmitter and receiver
Figure 4: Output power spectral density of a radar transmitter with a
transmit power of 23.8 dBm at 23.7 GHz.
Figure 5: Yield analysis of the cascaded output P1dB of radar
transmitter. The observed yield analysis does not vary much from the
nominal analysis.
760



deviation of 10% (uniformly distributed) from the device
expected performance.It can be observed that the passive
mixer degrades the overall performance of the transmitter
which is compensated by the power amplifier.
TABLE I
SIMULATION PARAMETERS - RADAR
Symbol Parameter Value

c
Transmit Centre Frequency 23.7GHz
B

Frequency Band K-Band

P
1
Transmit Power 23.7dBm
HS Minimum Detectable Signal

-73dBm
R
m
Maximum Range 78.5m
A
g
Antenna Gain 15dBi
RCS Radar Cross Section of the train 100m
2




Figure 6 shows the yield analysis NF performance of the radar
receiver. It is observed that the cascaded NFs nominal value
is 3.05dB. The yield analysis shown is obtained over 1000
realizations with 10% uniform distribution. It can also be
observed that, the overall NF is dominated by the NF of the
first stage, in this case, the LNA. Table II depicts the
parameters considered for the analysis of the satellite
transmitter and satellite receiver.
TABLE II
SIMULATION PARAMETERS - SATELLITE
Symbol Parameter Value
B
R
Frequency Band Ku-band
F
u
Uplink Frequency 14-14.5GHz

F
d
Downlink Frequency 11.7-12.75GHz
0
1
Transmit Antenna Gain

49dBi
0
R
Receiver Antenna Gain 25dBi
S Receiver Sensitivity -115dB
P
1
Transmit Power 47dBm
P
R
Received Power -105dBm
R Distance 36000km
E Channel Model Rician fading
Attenuation due to rain 3dB




In figure 7, the power spectral density of a satellite
transmitter operating in Ku band is shown. The signal is
transmitted with a very high effective isotropic radiated power
(EIRP) to counter the effect of very high path loss.





Figure 8 shows the performance of a satellite transceiver in
the context of yield analysis over cascaded p1dB.It can be
observed that there is sharp dip in the above curve from the
transmit antenna to the receiver antenna due to a path loss of
207dB, which is retrieved back by the LNA for proper
detection.
Figure 9 shows the performance of the satellite system in
terms of bit error rate (BER) vs signal to noise ratio (SNR) for
10000 channel realizations. The graph shows the degradation
in the performance of the system in presence of rain using a
maximum likelihood (ML) detector. It is observed that when it
is raining, the BER performance degrades for a particular
value of SNR.
Figure 6: Yield analysis of cascaded noise figure of the radar receiver.
The nominal value of noise figure of the cascaded system is as low as
3.05dB
Figure 7: Output power spectral density of satellite transmitter with a
transmit power of 47dBm
Figure 8: yield analysis-cascaded p1dB performance of a satellite
transceiver with a path loss of 207dB with 0
1
=49dB and 0
R
=25dB
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VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper we analyzed the performance of a radar
assisted satellite based train transit system in the context of RF
performance. It is also observed that P1dB and NF are the key
parameters in predicting the performance of the transmitter
and receiver respectively. Further it is envisaged that rain on
the satellite system will be negligible as long as the received
signal strength is greater than the receiver sensitivity. In the
considered system we considered that the trains always have a
LOS with a satellite. However, there will be a momentarily
loss of signal at the receiver when the train enter the tunnels.

























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Figure 9: Effect of degradation due to rain on BER vs SNR performance
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