Implementation of a Multipath communication protocol for railway application, based on GSM-R and LTE

This thesis is the outcome of an internship in Rete Ferroviaria Italiana (RFI) and belongs to railways scenario. The next challenge for european railways is to develop a completely autonomous transport system, without any need for a driver inside the train. Our case study is the following one: a special train, used for diagnostic on the rails, is going to be driven by remote. It will inspect the rails, looking for any obstacles, damaged infrastructure or strangers present around the railway. It is equipped with a video camera placed on the frontside of the train, which sends the video stream to the driver outside of the train. The goal of this project is to find a suitable solution, taking into account the current telecommunications infrastructure used by Italian railways and all the related problems. The solution for the video streaming comes from the use of multipath transport protocol joinly with an adaptive video streaming technique. Multipath is guaranteed by MPTCP, which allows as to use both GSM-R and LTE at the same time: the latter is used for reliability and the former to obtain a high quality streaming. Moreover, the video quality to be sent can be dynamically changed, adapting to the available bandwidth. This leads to the use of Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH). This technology allows us to use the already existing HTTP framework, but with added capabilites such us bandwidth adaptation.