Article

Prof. (Dr.) V Purnachandra Rao

Ex. Director/Indian Railways Institute of Signal Engineering & Telecommunications (IRISET)-Secunderabad

GSM - R (Global System for Mobile Communication - Railway)

GSM technology has been adopted for specic railway use and development of this application commenced around 1997. This has now been standardized by the U.I.C. (French acronym for International Union of Railways) and is widely used among the European Railways. About 38 countries including India have now working GSM-R networks. Indian Railways have installed GSM-R over ve zones in the Northern and Eastern regions on 2,431 km of track - commissioned between 2005 and 2009. become costlier. Moreover, emergency communication becomes easier and far more prompt against cable communication which has sockets placed at xed intervals. For Indian Railways additional benet arises with the elimination of the frequent need to replace stolen cable specially in the eastern regions, also avoid infrastructure for radio patching covering breaks in cable. The savings in lifecycle costs by replacing cable are so enormous that there was no need to perform a cost benet analysis. GSM-R enables voice/ staff of different trains, trackside staff, shunting staff etc. are envisaged. GSM-R has other additional facilities incorporated such as voice broadcast call - to convey recorded announcements or orders to all users in a particular region; voice group call - to allow a supervisor to speak to a particular group of professionals, say, maintainers or shunting staff and receive feedback only one at a time; emergency call - any user, specially, the driver can call all the drivers of trains in his area, also the controller, by pressing a `red`button, all phones have `red` buttons for the purpose of emergency calls; functional addressing -instead of ringing the full mobile number (11-15 digits here), a short code, say, the number of the train or engine can be dialed (prexed by a digit for the function) to reach the desired functionary faster; location dependant addressing - the driver can reach the controller or station master of the region he is in, by either pressing a button or dialing a short code (e.g. UKrail has prescribed a yellow button); and multilevel precedence or preemption - there are seven priority levels depending on the status of user and the user with higher priority can preempt an ongoing call of a lesser priority user-emergency call having the highest priority. The above features are termed Advanced Speech Call Items (ASCIs or ASCs), and these require translation to the appropriate mobile telephone numbers of users which is done by the Intelligent Network (IN) provided at the Mobile Switching Centre (MSC) with the help of concerned registers (HLR, GCR). At present, the ASC mechanism has been suspended on Indian Railways (IR) due to misuse by some operators which led to blocking of the network and will be recommissioned on the release of explicit instructions for use by the various operators to avoid future blocking. Also GSM-R is applicable to high speeds upto 500km/hr of trains.

MS-Mobile Station BSS-Base Station Subsystem BSC-Base Station Controller BTS-Base Transceiver System

NSS-Network Switching Subsystem MSC-Mobile Switching Centre OMS-Operation and Maintainance System IN-Intelligent Network

HLR-Home Location Register VLR-Visitor Location Register GCR-Group Call Register VMS-Voice Mail Service

EN-External Networks PRN-Private Railway Network ON-Other Networks SMS-Short Message Service PSTN-Public Switched Telephone Network

Why GSM-R?
European Railways chose the wireless network of GSM-R as the maintenance of cables or overhead lines had

data communication between train controller, drivers/guards of trains, and station masters within the controlled area. Also communications among running

Other Uses as on European Railways (ER)

In addition to transmission of voice/ data among various railway staff, the

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GSM-R enables voice/data communication between train controller, drivers/guards of trains, and station masters within the controlled area. Also communications among running staff of different trains, trackside staff, shunting staff etc. are envisaged.
ER use this system for transmitting data for train control as well. This was conceived as a standard originally for EIRENE (European Integrated Railway Radio Enhanced Network) and part of a plan for ERTMS (European Railway Train Management System) for automatically controlling the train by transmitting data on train speeds and receiving data from transponders placed on track. Also passenger communication is available wherein the ordinary passenger gets information on follow-on connections onward reservation details, hotel/taxi/ bus reservations, newspaper and other texts via FAX and Internet access etc. These facilities are not used in India at present. It is however reported that some station masters on North Central Railway have used voice to convey signal aspects to drivers in times of fog in winter to avoid detentions, with the exchange of private numbers (colonial practice akin to variable PIN codes) and recording in voice recorder for authenticity. GSM-R is now compulsory for all new installations on ER. GSM-R architecture simplied: A simplied architecture of GSM-R is illustrated. GSM-R is a cellular mobile network with the cells placed along the track and the base towers at the stations, the distance between base stations can be a maximum of 15 km but normally it is 10-12 km. The BTSs are two per station covering two overlapping cells and placed in a multiloop structure with 4 BTSs per BSC serving the needs of redundancy. The network is very similar to a public mobile cellular network but designed to cater for railway use such as the Advanced Speech Calls. For this an Intelligent Network (IN) with special databases is provided to translate the special codes like functional numbers to individual mobile phone numbers. IN is assisted by the data in the HLR and GCR. The system is designed for a C/I (Carrier to Interference) ratio of greater than 15dB and should serve in dense forests, long tunnels, deep cuttings, gorges etc. Frequencies around 900 Mhz band are used and it is a Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) system using Gaussian Minimum Shift Keying (GMSK) modulation. The paths linking BTSs, BSCs,

Feedback: The feedback on the GSM-R systems installed on IR has been generally positive. There are pending demands from running staff for possession of additional handsets. Cases have been reported where failures of electric locomotives have been diagnosed faster with the help of loco controllers who could speak to the staff at site. Detentions could be avoided for trains in foggy conditions by transmission of signaling information.S ome problems due to nonairconditioning of BTSs in hightemperature zones in summer may have to be remedied in due course. Need for indigenous development: With the GSM networks covering almost the whole of the country and mobile communication becoming an essential part of daily life and business, we cannot depend on imported equipments for

GSM-R is a cellular mobile network with the cells placed along the track and the base towers at the stations, the distance between base stations can be a maximum of 15 km but normally it is 10-12 km.
and MSC are covered by optic bre cable. A typical general purpose handset and a typical emergency call are illustrated. The controllers and engine drivers work with xed terminals and trackside personnel are supplied with rugged handsets (operational purpose), general purpose (light weight) handsets are given to all other train running staff. Network suppliers: There are three network suppliers or operators in the global arena - Nortel (taken over by Kapsch), Nokia-Siemens, and Huawei. The ones installed in India are either from Nortel or Nokia-Siemens. The rst GSM-R in India was installed on Eastern Railway in 2005, earlier than the rst system in Europe, i.e. Netherlands which was commissioned in 2006. long. There is need to develop indigenous equipments by reverse engineering in the elds of semiconductor, computer, and wireless technologies, just as the Japanese, South Koreans, and Chinese have done. Next step is research & development to further upgrade the technology. Future development: Some developments to update the technology to 4G are being considered in Europe and China, say, by adopting LTE/SAE,Wi-Max etc.

Bibliography
[1] http://www.wikipedia.org /wiki/ GSM-R/ [2] http://www.selex-comms.com/ [3] http:/ /www.uic.org/ [4] http:/ /www.gsmr-info.com/ [5] http://www.rgsonline.co.uk/general/
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About the Author

P Prof. (Dr.) V Purnachandra Rao has served the Indian Railways for 34 years in various capacities from Asst. Engineer to Chief Engineer (signal & telecom) and retired as Director/Indian Railways Institute of Signal Engineering & t T Telecommunications-Secunderabad. He obtained his Ph.D. from Anna University in Application of microprocessors t to Electronic Interlocking during service and after retirement worked as Professor & Head/CSE & ECE deptts. as w well as Principal in privately managed Engg. Colleges. At present he is a Professor (Emeritus) at an Engg. College in Chennai teaching electronics & computer engg. subjects. He is a life member of CSI. C

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