The final event of the “Emulradio4Rail” project was held on Friday 11st December 2020 in virtual modality. The project belongs to the H2020 Shift to Rail research program (Results) and Radiolabs joined as project member.
Emulradio team was composed by the French University Gustave Eiffel (Coordinator) and European partners such as Radiolabs (Italy), the University of Lille (France), the research center DTU (Denmark), Metro Madrid (Spain) and the start-ups Ikerlan (Spain) and Eurnex (Germany). The project aim was to develop an emulation platform of different communication technologies (terrestrial, satellite, WiFi) to support railway signaling based on the European ERMTS standard.
In accordance with the new Advanced Communication System (ACS) platform – bearer independent and based on the IP protocol – and with the objective of Zero On site testing to reduce the time and costs of on field measurements , Emulradio4Rail project allows to emulate the data transmissions from/to the train, in order to estimate the performance of the telecommunications system in terms of Key Performance Indicators (KPI), the Quality of Service (QoS) and Experience (QoE) levels.
In this context, Radiolabs has developed the satellite component of the emulator, to analyze in the laboratory the typical behavior of GEO type satellite radio links and can be flexibly extended to the new MEO and LEO satellite constellations.
The project ended with a remote test session of the satellite emulator (at the Radiolabs laboratories in Rome) which was “virtually” integrated with the Hitachi Rail ACS telecommunications platform (at the laboratories in Genoa). This test – the first one in Europe – has demonstrated the versatility of the emulator to operate in physically distant contexts, reducing time and costs and paving the way for new simulation models applicable to all communication technologies.
