Mobile WiMAX throughput and delay measurements in railroad environment

The railroad industry in North America is heavily involved in improving the broadband wireless connectivity of their railroad operations. We propose our approach of establishing a Mobile WiMAX test bed as a part of our collaborations with the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) for investigating the performance of current and upcoming broadband wireless technologies in a railroad environment. The focus is on studying the impact of mobility on the wireless system throughput for moving trains at high velocities. Our goal is to provide a comprehensive measurement that will assist others in understanding Mobile WiMAX performance and guiding future network deployment. In this paper, we describe details of our test bed and discuss test results obtained from our laboratory and test bed. Based on our measurements, we can achieve a throughput of approximately 2.8 Mbps downlink and 2 Mbps uplink with the most robust modulation scheme, a maximum distance of 7.5 kilometers, and a speed of 60 mph, making Mobile WiMAX a promising candidate for large-scale deployments in environments such as the railroad industry.