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).