Performance analysis and evaluation of EDGE system for high-speed railway

Global System for Mobile Communications-Railway (GSM-R) is used for communication between trains and train control center to guarantee the operation safety of High-Speed Railway (HSR), which also offers a rich set of voice services and data services related with train control and dispatching. But GSM-R has little further services bearing potential. Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE) system can provide higher services bearing capability through the simple upgrade than GSM-R. EDGE can achieve a good tradeoff between service bearing capability and investment cost. In this paper, we investigate the impact of movement speed on the system performance of EDGE to evaluate whether EDGE can be adopted in HSR. The EDGE system performance with fast fading channel is analyzed theoretically. Next we set up a hard-in-the-loop simulation platform to evaluate the effects of speed on the performance of EDGE system. The simulation results show that EDGE system can satisfy Quality of Services (QoS) requirements of HSR.