HIGH RELIABILITY GSM-R NETWORK DESIGN

By Charles Huang

Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

Charles Huang High Reliability GSM-R Network Design
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

Abstract:
The GSM-R network requires higher reliability because of the 7*24 running mode of railway
operation. This article introduces three technologies: dual switching network, double radio
coverage and fallback operation. The first two technologies focus on improving the reliability of
GSM-R network, and the third technology is used to help railway operators to deal with
emergencies. For dual switching network technology, an improvement in availability is
analyzed in comparison with a single switching network. In terms of double radio coverage
technology, a sample analysis is made to show that it is necessary to introduce double radio
coverage technology, and one frequency saving solution is provided. It will be useful for those
customers who have not enough frequency spectrum resource but need a reliable network for
security data transferring, e.g. train control application. According to fallback operation
technology, the application scenario is described, under certain conditions, such as an
earthquake , the transmission may be down, the basic communication capability of GSM-R
BTS will help to provide effective communication in response to an emergency. With these
technologies combined, customers can construct a more reliable GSM-R network and
enhance its capability to deal with an emergency situation.

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Charles Huang High Reliability GSM-R Network Design
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

1 Introduction 2 Acronyms
As an economical and high capacity BSC Base Station Controller
transportation system, railways play a very BTS Base Transceiver Station
important role in commuter and freight GGSN Gateway GPRS Support Node
transportation. In order to increase GPRS General Packet Radio Service
transportation efficiency, most railways are GSM-R Global System for Mobile
operating in a 7*24 working mode. As a communications Railway
system designed particularly for railway HLR Home Location Register
communications, GSM-R therefore must HSPA High Speed Packet Access
take this high traffic working mode into MGW Media Gateway
account, and give adequate consideration to MSC Mobile Switching Center
system availability. As the technology MTBF Mean Time Between Failures
advances, critical component redundancy is MTTR Mean Time To Recovery
realized in all GSM-R switching equipment, SGSN Serving GPRS Supporting Node
allowing availability to reach 99.999% or WiMAX Worldwide Interoperability for
better. While this availability is high enough Microwave Access
for public communication networks, it alone
is inadequate for a network related to the 3 Network reliability design
safe running of trains. Therefore the 3.1 Dual switching network
redundancy design should be considered at In a GSM-R network, the dual switching
network level in order to further enhance the scheme uses the structure illustrated in the
network’s capability to deal with natural following figure:
disaster, transmission breakdown or single
point failure. For the switching network Transmission network
Equipment room1 Equipment room2
including MSC, HLR, and BSC, some HLR
HLR
mature solutions applied in public
communication networks can be introduced MSC MSC
Server Server
into GSM-R, e.g. core network dual-homing,
MSC pool etc. For existing GSM-R radio
MGW MGW
networks a double coverage technology has
been applied and this helps to improve the BSC BSC
network availability. In addition, we also
Transmission
need to consider a possibility of transmission BTS netw ork

network failure; GSM-R should provide basic

communication capability for handling
emergencies when transmission is broken.
In the following paragraphs, we will discuss
the above mentioned technologies, the
problems that may arise during deployment
and corresponding solutions.
The following gives a brief description of the
above figure to make it clear:
Firstly, only those network elements related
to the train safety are listed, including MSC,
BSC and HLR; SGSN and GGSN are not
shown because they are used for the packet
data service, which is concerned with

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Charles Huang
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.
non-safety applications in the GSM-R
system, e.g. passenger information.
Secondly, considering that the MSC
reliability solution is based on Softswitch
architecture, the MSC in the above figure is
composed of two modules: MGW and MSC
server.
Thirdly, the dispatching subsystem is not
shown for the following reasons: duplicated
dispatching systems can solve the reliability
issue; even if the dispatching system fails, a
handset can be used to fulfill the
communication function.
According to the TL9000 specification, the
MTTR of telecommunication equipment
should be less than 3 hours. In fact,
generally, the MTTR of most vendors’
equipment is less than 1 hour. According to
the relation among Availability, MTBF, and
MTTR:
Availability = MTBF / (MTBF + MTTR)
We can get:
MTBF = (MTTR* Availability) / (1-
Availability)
Assuming that MTTR is 1 hour, and
availability is 99.999%, the MTBF is 99999
hours. For a dual switching network, if one
network element fails, the other
corresponding network element will take
over all the services; generally it takes 30
seconds for this process, during which link
failure check and service availability check
can be completed. Based on this data, we
can calculate the availability of one pair of
network elements in a dual switching
network, which can reach 99999%.
Let’s calculate the availability of GSM-R
switching network according to the GSM-R
switching network structure, which is shown
in the above figure. From the figure we can
see, HLR, MSC Server, MGW, and BSC are
connected in a series structure, so the
availability can be obtained by multiplying
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High Reliability GSM-R Network Design
the availabilities of the four pairs of network
elements:
Availability = 99.99999% * 99.99999% *
99.99999% * 99.99999% = 99.99995%
If a single dual switching network, that
means a single HLR works instead of one
pair of HLRs in a dual switching network etc,
the availability can be calculated by
multiplying the availability of the four single
network elements:
Availability = 99.999% * 99.999% * 99.999%
* 99.999% = 99.995%
From the above calculation, it is pretty clear
that the availability is decreased only one
single HLR is used.
For a better understanding of this data, we
can calculate the average service
interruption time during one year: under dual
switching network conditions, the time is
0.26 minutes, but for a single switching
network, the time is 26 minutes. So a dual
switching network can increase the
availability of a GSM-R network effectively.
In addition, dual switching networks can help
to enhance the service extension capability.
For most simple requirements, we can use
hot patch technology to upgrade the network
element of GSM-R system; but for some
complex requirements, we should restart the
network element to finish the upgrading. In a
single switching network, this will cause
longer service interruption time; in a dual
switching network, this problem does not
exist, we can upgrade the network element
of one plane, and we can debug the service
online to ensure the upgrading works
properly. Services will never be disturbed
during this process with a tailored design.
3.2 Double-layer radio network
In the telecommunication industry, the MTBF
of a TRX module in a BTS can be 100,000
hours, and that of a base-band module can
Charles Huang
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.
be 500,000 hours. From these two indexes,
we can say that the availability of a BTS is
equivalent to that of the switching network.
When considering the components on one
BTS site, e.g. antenna, feeder, and power
supply/battery etc, the availability of these
components will reduce the availability of the
BTS, however this data is not accepted by
most people until now, especially for railway
communications. According to the
experimental data in the public
communication network, about 1% ~ 2% of
BTS will have one time failure, the data
varies with vendors and areas in which BTSs
are deployed. The experimental data shows
that it is necessary to use a double layer
radio network solution to overcome this
situation.
There are two different solutions for a
double-layer radio network: one is called
co-located site double-layer network
coverage, and the other is interleaved
redundancy single-layered coverage. They
are shown in the following figure:
co-located site double-layer network coverage
BTS 1A BTS 2A BTS 3A
BTS 1B BTS 2B
interleaved redundancy single-layered coverage
BTS 1A
BTS 2A BTS 3A
BTS 1B BTS 2B
In a theoretical calculation, the availability of
the two solutions is similar, but in practice,
interleaved redundancy coverage has better
performance, because the signal strength is
higher. So this solution has better
anti-interference capability and is suitable for
use in constructing a bearer network to
transfer security data, e.g. train control data.
In terms of the investment, a co-located site
network is more attractive, because two
High Reliability GSM-R Network Design
networks share the same infrastructure, thus
saving costs.
Of course, the redundancy radio network
solution needs more frequency resources for
implementin two layer networks. It means
the users will have to apply for more
frequencies for GSM-R. Now the 1800MHz
frequency band is to be used in Australia for
railway communication, about 15MHz od
spectrum can be used in most areas. When
considering the voice service only, this
frequency resource is enough; but when
considering the high speed data
requirements for real time monitoring of
video, or multimedia services, we still need
to look for a frequency saving solution. In the
future, HSPA or WiMAX technology, whose
single carrier occupies 5MHz of spectrum
will be adopted to transfer high speed data,
so if we can reduce the frequency resource
occupied by the GSM-R system, more
frequency resources can be used for high
speed data transfer.
When we consider the railway in remote
areas, the frequency saving solution is more
useful. Because the coverage of BTS using
BTS 3B
the 900MHz frequency band is inherently
better than the coverage of an1800MHz BTS,
by about a factor of 2, so the investment on
a 900MHz GSM-R network will be less than
that of an1800Mhz system. The 900MHz
BTS 3B
frequency resources are very limited, and
most of them are allocated to public
operators. For railway customers, it is
generally very difficult to get more 900MHz
frequency resources. If the customer wants
to construct a GSM-R network for carrying
the security data (e.g. ETCS level 2
applications), double-layer radio coverage is
necessary. The following solution can help to
solve the problem of insufficient frequency
resources.
We can divide the BTSs in a double-layer
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Charles Huang
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.
radio network into two groups: active group
and de-active group. The BTSs in the
de-active group don’t transmit radio signals
unless the BTSs in the active group fail, and
at this time, they will use the frequency of the
BTSs in the active group; this process is
controlled by the BSC. With this solution,
half of the frequency resources can be
saved because 2MHz of bandwidth is
enough for constructing a redundant layer
radio network (some BTSs can use O2 site
type). Some remote mineral corporations,
that utilize railways to transport ore, can use
this solution to construct a high reliability
GSM-R network, so that it is possible to use
ETCS level 2 technologies to improve
transportation efficiency.
3.3 Fallback Operation
Fallback operation means that the BTS can
provide a basic communication service for
local communications in the coverage area
of the BTS when the transmission between
BTS and BSC fails.
Generaly, the availability of low-end and
medium-range optical SDH transmission
equipment is 99.999% and the ring SDH
network can increase the availability of a
transmission network to a quite high level.
But under some conditions, e.g. earthquake,
we still need to consider the possibility of
transmission failure. When an unexpected
event happens, it is important to provide
communication capability within the affected
area. This will help to deal with emergency
events more effectively. Suppose this
scenario: an earthquake happened and the
transmission network was down, the BTS
could still work by using batteries; a train has
stopped, and a mass of people were waiting
to be evacuated from the train station. How
to carry out the evacuation in an orderly way?
If there was a system that could provide
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group call services, all the station staff could
maintain good communication with each
other, and everyone will know what to do
next, this would be very beneficial in dealing
with the emergency situation. So in
response to an emergency, a GSM-R BTS
should ideally provide a group call function
for railway staff to deal with the situation
effectively.
There is another point we should consider,
that is, the public communication system
may also crash. Should this happen then a
large number of Mobile Subscribers in the
public network may initiate an access
request to the GSM-R BTS, and this could
block the access channel and signaling
channel. To avoid this situation, the GSM-R
BTS should be able to broadcast system
information that defines the allowed access
control priority class, so public Mobile
Subscribers will not attempt to access the
GSM-R BTS once they receive this
notification. This method will prevent the
access channel and signaling channel from
being blocked, and the vital railway staff
communication will not be affected.
4 Conclusions
With the development of communication
technology, the availability of a single
network element has achieved a high level
of reliability. Since the GSM-R system must
ensure the safety of running trains, it should
enhance the system availability at the
network level. The technologies we talked
about, such as dual switching network,
double layer radio coverage etc., will not
only help to avoid single point failure, but will
also facilitate new service extensions.
Natural disasters may cause transmission
network failure, so the GSM-R BTS should
provide a fallback operation function to make
group call services available to the railway
Charles Huang High Reliability GSM-R Network Design
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

staff, thus facilitating emergency

communication procedures. By applying the
technologies described above in
combination, the availability of GSM-R
system will be enhanced, and the capability
to deal with emergency situations will be
greatly improved.

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4-6 November 2007, Sydney