Capacity Study for a 5G Satellite System to support Railway FRMCS Critical service over Europe

This paper provides an overview of the activities performed by Thales Alenia Space Italy (TAS-I) to evaluate the system capacity required for a satellite system to support the Future Railway Mobile Communication System (FRMCS) service in Europe. Georeferenced railway communication traffic, emulated by the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg (PLUS) starting from FRMCS use cases and transportation databases, has been fed into a software tool developed in-house and implementing capacity evaluation algorithms. Multiple scenarios, based upon recent efforts aimed at comparing different solutions for FRMCS servicing via satellite [1], have been investigated. The analysis performed quantifies the amount of cumulative data traffic and spectrum resources required by the satellite system, a prerequisite information to assess its feasibility and substantiate the opportunity for further development.