Wireless network architecture for evacuated tube transportation system

Evacuated Tube Transportation (ETT) systems have been claimed to have considerable strengths, including ultra-highspeed, safety, and environmentally-friendly. However, the frequent handover caused by the high-speed brings a challenge for ETT mobile wireless communication to preserve steady link performance. Moreover, in such a special scenario, the wireless link between the base station and the passengers on the train needs to experience fading from both metal pipe and train, thus the free-wave coverage with antennas in traditional high-speed rail wireless communication systems is not suitable for ETT. Based on the characteristics of ETT, an improved architecture of wireless communication network is proposed, using distributed base stations with remote radio units (RRUs) and baseband units (BBUs) and leaky waveguides to form stable coverage. And a redundant BBUs or RRUs structure is designed for coverage enhancement. Based on this redundant architecture, a fast handover scheme is proposed to resolve the handover problem. The analytical and simulation results show that the proposed scheme is capable of reducing communication outage probability and handover failure probability remarkably.