Huawei officially launched the Future Railway Mobile Communication System (FRMCS) solution at the InnoTrans 2022 and the 9th Huawei Global Rail Summit in Berlin, Germany, where special guests, Wang Guoyu, COO of Huawei Aviation & Rail BU, and Li Jie, President of Huawei Enterprise Wireless Domain, spoke about its success. This solution is a remarkable achievement for Huawei, as a result of its extensive research and experience in ICT deployment within the railway industry of over two decades. With a focus on improving safety and reliability, Huawei FRMCS expands train-to-ground wireless services from train control and dispatch to railway O&M, railway IoT, and more. It empowers widespread digital transformation of the rail sector, ensures train operation safety, and improves railway operations efficiency.
The demand for smart railways that can carry huge capacity is growing. Huawei FRMCS can not only provide the required high reliability and low latency for train control and dispatch, but also support new services such as locomotive status monitoring, train operation monitoring, and visualized dispatch of O&M personnel, improving fault prediction accuracy and O&M efficiency.
The FRMCS solution uses a new technology, 8T8R Smart MIMO, which allows it to achieve the same coverage in the 1900 MHz band as that of GSM-R in the 900 MHz band when working with high-power devices from Huawei's partners. This slashes deployment and maintenance costs of FRMCS on 1900 MHz and simplifies the deployment of FRMCS networks. By providing three levels of redundancy, including key boards, key network elements, and wireless networks, Huawei FRMCS eliminates single-point failures on networks, ensures high reliability of devices and networks, and meets the requirements of the European Train Control System (ETCS). Its architecture complies with railway industry standards, which facilitates the interconnection between wireless networks and railway industry applications, as well as the deployment of new services.
Li Jie said: "The railway industry is now in a critical period of digital transformation when the requirements for train-to-ground wireless communication systems are higher than ever before. Huawei FRMCS can meet these requirements by integrating Huawei's 4G and 5G technologies. It can help railway customers build high-reliability, high-bandwidth, future-oriented train-to-ground wireless broadband networks that are safe, reliable, converged, simplified, and capable of long-term evolution."
Huawei will work with industry standards organizations, industry customers, and partners to promote the maturing and large-scale commercial rollout of FRMCS, and build a wireless digital foundation for smart railways.