Ray-tracing simulation of railway station ecosystem in 5G scenario

The railway station environment is complex and characterized by communication needs of different types, which can be satisfied efficiently by modern technology. The specific characteristics of 5G technology make it extremely suitable to support a multitude of use cases including the specific requirements of the railway station ecosystem. For this study, the pioneering band for 5G in the European Union, 3.7 GHz, will be considered. This band represents a good compromise between capacity and coverage; indeed, with these frequencies it is possible to obtain wide coverage, deep indoor environments excluded, and an adequate transmission capacity. The medium band frequencies, therefore, lend themselves to responding to the different requirements of the 5G scenarios. The objective of the current analysis is the evaluation of the coverage of the stations through 5G networks: a calculation methodology based on ray-tracing simulations will be used to analyze the coverage of a railway station by a public 5G network and verify if this coverage can satisfy the diagnostics related use cases and, if necessary, to deploy low/very low power femtocells in strategic points to obtain ubiquitous coverage. The use of femtocells non-public network (NPN) can represent a reliable and scalable solution to any coverage problems in railway station scenarios.