Moving Relay Nodes On-board High Speed Trains in Austria: Is It worth It?

A large number of passengers in Austria commute on a daily basis by using High Speed Trains (HSTs). Nowadays, a large amount of passengers can be considered active mobile phone users. Due to increased numbers of mobile users, the capacity problem is considerably introduced. To deal with this issue, the railway company in Austria (ÖBB) has implemented Wi-Fi on-board the railjet high speed trains. However, this solution is able to minimize only the issues on last-hop. The main problem is the deployment of base stations along a specific railway track. To deal with coverage issues, the signal strengths for all User Equipments (UEs), 2G/3G/4G, should be increased by minimizing the vehicular penetration loss. For this purpose we take the advantage of using two inter-connected multiband multi-operator amplify-and forward Moving Relay Nodes (MRNs).