Performance of High Data Rate Transmission Scheme developed for train communications

New information and communication technologies revolutionized our current way of life. The rapid growth of these techniques reveals new needs, which contribute to the development of telecommunications in terrestrial transportation field. The trend today is to provide seamless connectivity services both for operations and passengers´ applications. These services allow operators to optimize exploitation and maintenance costs but also to enhance friendliness, comfort and security feeling of public transport by offering new services to passengers while travelling. All these applications require high data rate in uplink and downlink directions. In order to save huge terrestrial infrastructure deployment, our work considers an architecture based on the use of a satellite and a terrestrial link function of the availability of each system. In the final application, vertical handovers between the two links versus system availability will be implemented. This paper investigates the performance of the terrestrial link only over time varying channel when the receiver moves with a very high speed. This terrestrial link is based on a very similar physical layer to the IEEE802.16a standard. The performances of such a system are analyzed over a new Rayleigh fading channel simulator through simulations. First experimental results obtained at lower speed with a real transmission chain based on the simulated one are presented.