Huawei secures railway LTE project

Huawei has won the bid for the Shenhua Group Corporation’s Shuo Huang Railway (SHR) LTE project.

One of the largest coal supplying and trading companies, Shenhua has developed and implemented the world’s first LTE network for heavy-haul railways. SHR, with an operating route length of 594km, is a critical railway section for China’s West-to-East Coal Transfer project.

Shenhua hopes to expand the railway’s capacity to transfer 350 million tons of coal and needed to maintain efficient and safe operations of 20,000-ton capacity heavy-haul trains. A wireless broadband system was required to communicate between the master-slave locomotives located at both ends of trains, which could be up to 2.5km apart. The railway’s 800MHz and 400kHz communications system would not be able to support the expansion with its limited coverage distance and low reliability.

To address these challenges, Huawei worked with six industry partners to research, plan, conduct trial tests, and engineer the construction of SHR’s new railway mobile broadband communications system since 2010. Over four years, multiple lab tests were conducted and four on-site tests were completed at the railway’s 42km trial section.

“Reliable communications is crucial for operating long trains and to expand transfer capacity. Huawei eLTE solution has helped to address these challenges by enabling communications over 2.5km and efficient video scheduling,” said Cao Yanping, Deputy General Manager of Shuohuang Railway.

Huawei eLTE solution has been tailored to the SHR and uses a 1.8G LTE TDD network to enable communications for 20,000-ton heavy-haul trains over long distances. The LTE network supports the multi-locomotive synchronous control system, controllable train tail system and other heavy-haul train services that require a reliable and secure communications system.

With full network-element redundancy and a dual-network coverage and multi-priority Quality of Service (QoS) protection mechanism, Huawei eLTE network ensures 99.999 percent system availability and guarantees that there will be no service interruptions. The eLTE network also enhances operational and maintenance efficiency with trunking dispatching, remote data acquisition, wireless video surveillance, train control data transmission and other services.