LoRa-based railway signalling system for secondary lines

The thesis proposes a novel Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol designed to work in a new LoRa-based railway signalling system able to locate and verify the integrity of the train over the track. This new signalling system has been thought to realize a cost-effective solution for the implementation of the ERTMS-ETCS in secondary regional lines. However, the MAC protocols already present in literature are not able to meet the stringent requirement of the system neither in terms of latency nor in terms of coverage. In the thesis, a synchronous beacon-based protocol, able to respect both the coverage and the latency requirement of the system, is proposed. It can be considered as the sum of two different communication protocols: one based on a start topology and the other based on a linear multi-hop topology. To evaluate the performance of the protocol a dynamic time-discrete event simulator, written in Python, was created accounting for all the application features: it implements both architectures, the whole synchronization procedure and the data transmission phase.