SATCOM Rail (Specification of a Certification Framework for SATCOM in Railway Safety Applications) – ESA CSC: Connectivity & Secure Communications

Objectives

The SATCOM rail project addresses the specification of a framework for the introduction and authorisation of Satellite Communications in support of railway safety and liability critical applications and services.

In addition, the study identifies, describes and evaluates the most promising satellite communication solutions candidates to meet the requirements, either as self-standing solution or complementing existing terrestrial communication networks.

The purpose of this project is to pave the way for the introduction of satellite communications in support of railway safety and liability critical applications, by providing an understanding whether and under what conditions satellite communications can be introduced in this domain and provide added value over existing and future terrestrial solutions.

The main elements to be addressed are:

To identify which railway (safety) applications and services can be supported by satellite communications.
To expose how satellite communications solutions could improve existing terrestrial communications in the railway domain.
To explain how satellite communications can be adapted to the railway communication network.
To specify the requirements that a satellite communication system shall satisfy and to provide guidelines for the development and operation of these solutions in order to be approved and authorised in the scope of railway safety applications.
To propose alternative communication architectures for railways including satellite communication, which meet the identified requirements for communication solutions.
To assess the economically viability of introducing satellite communications in railway operations, including an identification of the market opportunities and a cost-benefit analysis in relation to existing systems and their operation and maintenance.

Challenges

The key issue to be addressed in this project is to specify an Authorisation Framework for satellite communications mainly oriented to railway safety applications, in addition to identify and describe the most promising satellite communication system candidates to accomplish this challenge.

Some of the challenges associated with arriving at an Authorisation Framework and then to be finally authorised are:

To identify what requirements are demanded by the applications and how these requirements could be expressed independently of the current technology. An important matter is to characterise the data traffic model.
To study if satellite communications are suitable to provide the required latency, coverage, data rate, etc., and to propose adequate architectures or combination of architectures in order to account for the needs and requirements of the identified applications.
To analyse the implications and constraints of introducing a third party service provision.
To define the process and actors involved in the authorisation and to assess if satellite communications are able to satisfy railway specifications, including the conformity with relevant TSIs.