Enabling Over 50% Increase In China Railway Hauling Capacity
SHANGHAI, May 5, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, announced that its latest GSM-R solution has supported China's Da-Qin Railway Line with a successful 30,000-ton heavy-duty traction test, which increased China's railway hauling capacity by over 50%, enabling China to be one of the few countries in the world to conduct transportation of 30,000-ton heavy-haul trains in existing railway systems.
"For a 3,971-meter long, 320-wagon 30,000-ton heavy-haul train to pass the traction test successfully in April, that is a key milestone to the development of China's heavy-haul railway transportation," said Mr. Xu Zhiyu, General Manager of Huawei Enterprise Wireless Product Line. "As the main artery of China's coal transportation network, the revamp of the wireless communication technologies along the Da-Qin Railway Line poses a challenge for railway operators to address the growing demand for heavy-haul railway transportation and efficient long-distance wireless communication in China. To address the evolution of transportation industry, it is crucial for railway operators to ensure safety and railway hauling capacity at the same time. With extensive experience and insights in wireless communication technology and railway industry, Huawei has been providing the global railway industry with customized, reliable communications solutions, where our GSM-R solution ensures railway systems with advanced, secure, and reliable communications infrastructure, to allow railway operators to save costs and achieve sustained profitability."
Da-Qin Railway Line, spanning a total of 653 km across northeastern China, is one of the key railway lines in China, which transports around 400 million tons or nearly one-fifth of the nation's coal per year. It is also the first China railway line to integrate a GSM-R communications system. Huawei has been working closely with Da-Qin Railway Line since 2005, and had since undertaken the construction of a GSM-R wireless network for the line, ensuring multi-locomotive synchronous control and unblocked radio links from departure to destination across the railway line.
During the deployment of the GSM-R solution on Da-Qin Railway Line, Huawei had replaced the line's repeaters with the latest DBS3900 base stations. With the deployment of the DBS3900 base stations, Da-Qin Railway Line is able to solve issues caused by repeaters, including short service life, poor immunity to interference, and network performance deterioration due to aging device. In addition, Huawei specially developed and implemented a RRU multi-site cell technology for the railway line, incorporating the remote radio unit (RRU) in different physical sites through the control of the baseband unit (BBU), overcoming frequent network handovers and weak coverage under a high-speed environment. The RRU multi-site cell technology significantly reduces the number of network handovers and improves network handover success rates, especially in tunnels, while going full-speed. This ensures the stability and security of data services in multiple locomotive operation and control for long heavy-haul trains, and effectively alleviates the shortage of frequency resources for railway communications.
To enhance reliability and convenience of maintenance of the entire network by Da-Qin Railway Network, Huawei customized a hot-back solution which combines the geo-redundancy solution in wireless network with the improved geo-redundancy backup solution for soft switching in the core network. Upon adoption of this solution, the mean time between failures (MTBF) is significantly increased, preventing network failures due to faults in any node or device. The Huawei Base Station Controller (BSC) node redundancy solution in Huawei's GSM-R solution resolves problems of existing solutions in the industry, including slow device start-up, data switchover, and insufficient effective surveillance and maintenance methods. To enable quick and automatic switchovers between active and standby BSCs, As for Huawei's BSC duo-redundancy solution enhances further stability of the system in carrying upper-layer services. To address the need for Da-Qin Railway Line to achieve synchronous control and high standards of safety and reliability, Huawei implements a redundancy backup solution to ensure smooth running of wireless networks. As a result, the GSM-R network in the Da-Qin Railway Line is able to achieve full E2E redundancy backup in the core network, BSC, and Base Transceiver Station (BTS). This greatly improves network reliability and ensures efficient and smooth operation of the Da-Qin Railway Line.
To address the evolution of railway transportation technologies, Huawei has been working closely with railway operators around the world to develop and implement GSM-R railway networks. By the first quarter of 2014, Huawei GSM-R solutions covered 24,000 km of railway lines globally. In 2013, Huawei achieved a 75% share of new contracts in the global GSM-R market. Moving forward, Huawei will continue to provide high-quality customer-centric GSM-R products, solutions and services for customers in the railway industry, contributing to the modernization and digitalization of modern railway communication networks.
