5GRAIL ticked an important milestone by having a successful field demonstration on the 20th September 2023. The project partners and representatives from the European Commission joined DB’s Lab ICE “advanced TrainLab” which performed a demo run on the 5GRAIL testbed in Annaberg, Germany.
Several railway operational and performance applications have been successfully demonstrated: Voice calls including Group Calls, Railway Emergency Calls ( in FRMCS, GSM-R, coexistence FRMCS and GSM-R and transition from FRMCS to GSM-R modes), uplink Video Streaming and multiple applications over the same TOBA – Video and Voice Call simultaneously.
This was performed via the 5GRail FRMCS network (3GPP 5G Stand Alone, Mission Critical).
Since 2020, the 5GRAIL partners have worked on designing and building prototypes for the future rail communication system as well as for the applications to be tested -ETCS, ATO, Voice including REC, TCMS, PIS, Video and Remote Vision. A novel train onboard architecture (TOBA) gateway concept has been realized and many functionalities of 3GPP’s Mission Critical Service framework implemented.
The prototypes delivered by the 5GRAIL project, tested in lab and also in field tests in France and Germany are a major and solid step towards the FRMCS 1st edition, the first FRMCS system that railways can implement, which specifications are expected to be introduced in CCS TSI in Q2 2027.
