The partners of the AB4RAIL Project attended the on-line meeting with representatives of the X2Rail project (X2RAIL-5 (shift2rail.org) as part of the 12th COLA meeting (Collaboration Agreement with the railways community) to present the outcomes of the project and discuss the results. In this frame, Free Space Optics (FSO), High Altitude Platform Systems (HAPS), and Low Earth Orbit (LEO) High-Throughput Satellites have been analysed from the technical and economical point of view, as described by Alessandro Vizzari (Radiolabs). These technologies have been selected and assessed in the AB4Rail project among the future telecommunication technologies for the integration into the existing railway infrastructure.
The coordinator of the project Franco Mazzenga (University of Rome Tor Vergata and CTO Radiolabs) presented results on transport protocols suited for railway scenarios as the Transport Control Protocol (TCP), User Datagram Protocol (UDP), Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP), and QUIC protocol, including the analysis of HTTP and FTP (and their secure versions of HTTPS and FTPS) application protocols.
Among the others, LEO constellations have emerged as a mature and step-change technology being already deployed and expected to dominate the satcom offerings with lower latency and world-wide coverage to complementing terrestrial solutions.
Prof. Romeo Giuliano of University Guglielmo Marconi (www.unimarconi.it) illustrated the AB4Rail WP4 ongoing activities concerning the exploitation and dissemination of the results obtained in the AB4Rail project. Finally, the attendees actively joined the Q/A session. The next CoLA meeting is scheduled on monday 17th October 2022.
