Specifically, this project effort, funded through the agreement, will accomplish the following 1 conduct an in depth review of the operating regulations and restrictions of the 160MHZ frequency band…

Specifically, this project effort, funded through the agreement, will accomplish the following 1 conduct an in depth review of the operating regulations and restrictions of the 160MHZ frequency band and its theoretical applicability for different key railroad applications such as wayside communication, onboard train control and monitoring operations, and the exploration of mixed voice data applications 2 determine feasible modulation and coding schemes for the 160MHZ considering different channelization schemes, and the afforded spectral efficiency and performance 3 develop a comprehensive computer simulation driven wireless propagation model that expands upon our previous work phase 2 and the simulation environment resulting from IT, to quantify path loss in rural, urban, metropolitan and subterranean environments for this frequency band 4 develop different performance models to evaluate key end to end protocol stack performance metrics using the propagation models from objective 3 and the grantee s prior efforts as a foundation parameters of interest include a bit and packet error rates over the wireless segmentb data latency and throughput over wireless network link layer analysisc data latency and throughput over the communication network architecture end to end analysis including higher layers such as network, middleware layer, and application LAYER5 research approaches to enable channel bundling or subcarrier pooling across non neighboring channels of 25KHZ width 6 develop and conduct representative lab tests using software radios that will directly provide data for validation of the developed computer simulation models 7 document all findings and present to the railroad industry stakeholders to help guide their own efforts in radio technology development