201903 – Alvarez – ETCS L2 and CBTC Over LTE – Latest Developments

In October 2013, the author and his colleague presented a white paper to the IRSE Perth Technical Meeting entitled “ETCS L2 and CBTC over LTE – Convergence of the radio layer in advanced Train Control System”. The paper described the trends towards using increasingly similar hardware platforms to implement different Train Control System applications, and how that trend could affect the radio component of those same Train Control Systems.

The paper identified 3GPP defined Long-Term Evolution (LTE) as an emerging radio technology that could act as a common train-to-trackside transport layer that replaced the existing radio layers of the main Automatic Train Control applications of the day, European Train Control System (ETCS) and Communications-Based Train Control (CBTC).

Half a decade has passed since that paper was first presented, and natural passage of time begs the question: what has been the evolution of Automatic Train Control systems since then? Have our 2013 predictions proved accurate? And what can be said about what is likely to happen in the next five years?

This paper will re-visit the postulates presented back in 2013 and review them against the actual technological evolution of the last five years, by drawing a picture of the current state of affairs in this technology space.