LoRa-Based Railway Signalling System for Secondary Lines

Italian railway signalling systems are slowly evolving from National (such as the SCMT-SSC) towards European solutions (i.e. the ERTMS-ETCS). On the National railway network, only high-speed lines implement European-type signalling; this work proposes a technological and cost-effective solution for the implementation of ERTMS-ETCS for secondary regional lines, which are about 60 per cent in Italy. The paper investigates a railway scenario with electronic devices placed on each vehicle of the train and on some catenary masts at a fixed distance. Both are equipped with LoRa modules for wireless communication and localisation purposes. A LoRa-based wireless train network for a feasible onboard train integrity solution, is implemented following a European signalling system. Moreover, two train-to-ground network solutions based on the same technology are presented to develop an effective communication system with train localization capability. To this aim, the two LoRa network architectures are compared, and the network topology is divided into: i) on-board, ii) train-to-ground, and iii) infrastructure-to-infrastructure network.