Radio Communication Scenarios in 5G-Railways

With the rapid development of railways, especially high-speed railways, there is an increasingly urgent demand for new wireless communication system for railways. Taking the mature 5G technology as an opportunity, 5G-railways (5G-R) have been widely regarded as a solution to meet the diversified demands of railway wireless communications. For the design, deployment and improvement of 5G-R networks, radio communication scenario classification plays an important role, affecting channel modeling and system performance evaluation. In this paper, a standardized radio communication scenario classification, including 18 scenarios, is proposed for 5G-R. This paper analyzes the differences of 5G-R scenarios compared with the traditional cellular networks and GSM-railways, according to 5G-R requirements and the unique physical environment and propagation characteristics. The proposed standardized scenario classification helps deepen the research of 5G-R and promote the development and application of the existing advanced technologies in railways.