Fading Characteristics in the Railway Terrain Cuttings

A high performance wireless network is essential for for the railway communication and control systems. Research on the fading characteristics in railway environment is of great importance for the design of the railway wireless network. In this paper, measurements are taken in railway terrain cuttings area using track side base stations of the GSM-R network. The fitted path loss model, shadow fading, and dynamaic range of the small scale fading are obtained and compared to the results of viaduct scenario. The propagation environment of the terrain cuttings turns out to be worse than the viaduct area. The path loss exponent is found to be 4.3. The shadow loss can be reasonably described by a log-normal distribution. It is also found that the bridges over the cuttings can cause extra loss of about 5 dB. The dynamaic range of the small scale fading is from 27 dB to 40 dB with a mean value of about 33 dB.