2012 MATC Fall Lecture Series: Hamid Sharif

Larissa Sazama Author

11/08/2017 Added

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2012 MATC Fall Lecture Series

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[00:00:00.324]Welcome everyone, to today's talk.
[00:00:03.830]We are honored to have Dr. Hamid Sharif
[00:00:05.924]speak on the State of Wireless Communications
[00:00:07.744]in North American Freight Railroads.
[00:00:09.993]He's been working on this topic for a long time,
[00:00:12.188]and I'm looking forward to an interesting talk.
[00:00:14.390]So, Dr. Sharif.
[00:00:15.680]Thank you.
[00:00:17.446]Dr. Ellett, I appreciate you writing me to come here,
[00:00:20.929]and Maxi to provide this opportunity for me.
[00:00:25.414]As the title is, I'm going to talk about the
[00:00:28.565]state of the wireless for railroads.
[00:00:31.593]Specifically, in area of freight railroads,
[00:00:35.364]and what the North American industry has done
[00:00:39.009]about this area.
[00:00:40.145](microphone adjustments)
[00:00:48.312]Wireless communications...
[00:00:50.680]I guess some folks are joining us, please.
[00:00:54.254]Wireless communications, of course,
[00:00:56.613]has impacted every aspects of our lives,
[00:01:01.370]and impacted the surface transportation
[00:01:04.298]and the specific needs of railroads.
[00:01:08.029]The Federal Railroad Administration, in their strategic plan
[00:01:12.765]identified, I'll read this line to you,
[00:01:15.186]wireless communication as one of the most critical
[00:01:18.870]areas to collect, process and disseminate information
[00:01:23.655]to improve safety, security and operational
[00:01:27.221]effectiveness of the railroads.
[00:01:30.392]So they realized that wireless communication
[00:01:33.749]plays a very important roles, for how to manage railroads,
[00:01:38.065]how to improve the safety,
[00:01:40.186]and how to provide better security
[00:01:43.086]for the surface transportation in the area of railroads.
[00:01:48.155]The very important factor here,
[00:01:50.277]if we look at where we are in railroads,
[00:01:54.950]in terms of the wireless communication,
[00:01:57.181]the voice still is older infrastructure,
[00:02:00.718]that is 30+ years old.
[00:02:03.406]Still the people on their locomotive, they have the railroad
[00:02:06.387]that they are communicating with, and the control centers.
[00:02:09.465]The quality of the radio and communication has got better,
[00:02:12.829]but it still is over that radio link.
[00:02:16.578]In terms of the data, they send data
[00:02:19.494]over a protocol called Advanced Train Control System,
[00:02:24.004]which was put together in 1980's, and at best
[00:02:27.823]that can provide 4800 to 9600 bits per second.
[00:02:33.721]When you look at that kind of data rate,
[00:02:36.600]that's not any match for any application that we are doing,
[00:02:40.085]specifically in radio and multimedia.
[00:02:42.816]But that's what they have.
[00:02:43.914]This is the link that they have between locomotive
[00:02:47.223]and the control centers, at the different railroads.
[00:02:52.300]So everybody realized that something should be done here.
[00:02:55.617]They looked at the a solution that would provide
[00:02:57.975]the technology for current and the future of railroad.
[00:03:05.235]We were supported through a grant
[00:03:07.605]by Federal Railroad Administration, to investigate
[00:03:11.158]what would be the suitable technology for the railroad.
[00:03:16.375]For the current applications and the future applications.
[00:03:21.167]Basically the objectives were:
[00:03:23.637]to make sure we have the highest speed data network
[00:03:26.434]for moving trains;
[00:03:29.343]make sure that the train's crew
[00:03:31.997]have real-time accessibility
[00:03:35.679]to internet and provide information to the crews,
[00:03:40.929]the different control centers or ground crew;
[00:03:44.795]and implement that into safety applications and operation.
[00:03:51.031]This project was supported by
[00:03:53.180]Federal Railroad Administration and major railroads
[00:03:56.380]in North America, which I have listed here.
[00:03:59.241]All supporting this project provided funding for us,
[00:04:02.652]and resources.
[00:04:04.333]Some of these you know.
[00:04:05.440]Union Pacific, of course, headquartered in Omaha, BNSF,
[00:04:10.438]CSX is supporting South-East US,
[00:04:14.887]like deployed around that area.
[00:04:17.347]Norfolk Southern Railway, and two railways from Canada,
[00:04:22.234]the Canadian National and Canadian Pacific.
[00:04:25.309]So, all of these supported this project
[00:04:27.960]because they wanted to see what would be
[00:04:30.710]a new standard technology for the railroad communication,
[00:04:34.801]that all of them can implement,
[00:04:36.904]that will provide interoperability.
[00:04:41.126]Before I talk about how this technology
[00:04:45.931]should be, they wanted the standard technology.
[00:04:49.897]Meaning that no proprietary technology,
[00:04:54.369]because different railroads, wanted to
[00:04:57.195]interoperate with each other.
[00:04:59.643]So if there was a solution from one sector of industry,
[00:05:04.107]then they were limited in terms of buying from that sector
[00:05:07.702]of industry, and getting all the support from that.
[00:05:10.873]But they wanted something that would be standard,
[00:05:13.287]that they could buy hardware from everyone
[00:05:16.149]and they would look it themselves.
[00:05:19.238]The way that we look at this project was
[00:05:22.107]all methodology based on three components.
[00:05:25.674]Of course, we had some analytical modeling and
[00:05:33.090]we did some mathematical modeling,
[00:05:35.486]based on what the needs are for the current applications
[00:05:38.783]of the railroads, what are their future needs.
[00:05:42.485]When we build a computer simulation model,
[00:05:46.153]to provide us scalability,
[00:05:48.210]in terms of what the performance should be.
[00:05:51.358]And then we build a testbed to test the data
[00:05:54.367]that we are getting from our mathematical models
[00:05:57.073]and simulations.
[00:06:01.855]The first technology that we looked at was Wifi.
[00:06:04.545]Let me explain about this.
[00:06:06.520]When you talk about the wireless communication
[00:06:09.720]for railroads, a couple technologies come to the mind.
[00:06:14.942]The first one, everybody says,
[00:06:16.274]"Oh why don't you use satellite?
[00:06:18.167]"Why don't you have satellite communications,
[00:06:21.509]"that support all the trains?".
[00:06:23.426]Satellite is a technology that we looked at.
[00:06:27.201]But, of course, it has it's own problems.
[00:06:30.109]The problem with satellite, the cost is very high.
[00:06:33.812]For example, Union Pacific has 6,000 locomotives.
[00:06:37.606]Putting equipment to receive and transmit to the satellite
[00:06:41.473]for every locomotive, is very expensive, very high.
[00:06:46.438]Secondly, technically some of the satellites
[00:06:50.380]do not provide, do not support critical mission.
[00:06:55.604]A satellite like 20,000 miles above the earth,
[00:06:58.925]the latency, the delay that goes information back and forth
[00:07:03.746]is very long, for some of the critical applications.
[00:07:08.350]It's okay for voice and all that,
[00:07:09.994]but if you are controlling something,
[00:07:11.587]a locomotive satellite wasn't a good option.
[00:07:15.208]So, satellite is not an option.
[00:07:17.071]The second option people say,
[00:07:18.275]"Why don't we use a cellular network?".
[00:07:20.937]The wireless communication that we have,
[00:07:23.486]we have a cell phone, a smartphone.
[00:07:25.827]Why don't you use that over the railroad?
[00:07:29.860]You don't realize that railroad,
[00:07:32.446]especially freight railroad, goes through
[00:07:34.464]some of the areas that cellular doesn't have any coverage.
[00:07:38.150]You go somewhere west of Nebraska, you find
[00:07:40.645]that you don't have any coverage on your phone.
[00:07:43.023]So, cellular is not a solution.
[00:07:46.826]Then we looked at...
[00:07:48.280]The first phase was WiFi.
[00:07:50.311]WiFi is a very mature technology,
[00:07:54.945]everybody is using it.
[00:07:56.400]It has advantages in terms of the throughput.
[00:07:59.115]The data rate is high enough, that supports applications.
[00:08:03.356]The frequency is not licensed,
[00:08:07.262]meaning that if the railroad wanted to use it,
[00:08:09.769]they didn't have to pay money for the license.
[00:08:14.828]But WiFi, as all of us have experienced
[00:08:17.966]that we use it in a stationary environment
[00:08:20.435]We use it in a building, we are using it in a campus.
[00:08:23.726]It's not used in a mobile environment.
[00:08:26.422]When you have a mobility, the signal
[00:08:28.865]is going to be affected.
[00:08:31.114]When you are moving like 70 miles an hour,
[00:08:33.625]this is different from using your WiFi
[00:08:35.529]in a stationary place.
[00:08:38.104]Many people believe that WiFi is not designed
[00:08:40.891]for mobile environments.
[00:08:42.629]But railroad wanted us to study and see
[00:08:44.987]if that can be used for mobile environment.
[00:08:48.588]We actually got into a discussion with some of the industry
[00:08:51.471]that are selling equipment to the railroads,
[00:08:53.775]and they told us it's not possible, it's not supported.
[00:08:57.834]So we did some mathematical modeling, and we found out,
[00:09:00.705]no, it did support the ability up to some level.
[00:09:04.454]That level was like 70 miles an hour.
[00:09:07.818]But that was through our mathematical models.
[00:09:13.043]It gave us a little bit of confidence,
[00:09:14.236]but we needed to expand that study.
[00:09:17.246]So we built our simulation model, we got the same data
[00:09:21.222]and then we started building the testpad,
[00:09:23.276]to really see if that works with the hardware
[00:09:26.519]that is available today.
[00:09:29.252]So, in doing the WiFi project.
[00:09:33.667]Some of the things that we wanted to look at,
[00:09:35.257]we wanted to look at the performance,
[00:09:36.903]in terms of the throughput.
[00:09:38.273]Is that good enough for some of the railroad applications?
[00:09:41.493]Does it support Quality of Service?
[00:09:43.533]Quality of Service, meaning that you are running
[00:09:46.010]applications that are time dependent.
[00:09:50.573]If you are sending video, for example,
[00:09:52.940]if some frames are not in the right order
[00:09:55.346]and are delayed, the quality of that is decreased.
[00:09:58.791]So we wanted to see studies supported by WiFi.
[00:10:02.258]And also, we wanted to see if that works
[00:10:04.233]for a railroad environment.
[00:10:05.977]Railroad environment is really a harsh environment.
[00:10:08.804]You have a locomotive that generates massive
[00:10:11.181]electro-magnetic field.
[00:10:13.961]Will that work with a WiFi?
[00:10:15.614]So these were the things that we were looking at.
[00:10:18.613]And then, mentioning some of the technical issues,
[00:10:22.427]these are more things that we
[00:10:24.443]as electrical engineers looked at.
[00:10:26.916]For example, signal fading.
[00:10:29.265]That's an issue when you are going around two trains
[00:10:32.127]and all that, the signal can fade.
[00:10:34.705]The Doppler shift, when you have different velocity
[00:10:37.477]is there.
[00:10:38.966]The multi signal is going to transmit from,
[00:10:41.641]let's say, locomotive to the base station.
[00:10:44.456]You could have different obstacles, and as you are moving,
[00:10:47.017]that is going to magnify the noise issue.
[00:10:50.311]The error that is generating.
[00:10:52.346]So all this study wasn't just to see
[00:10:54.435]if this is going to work or not.
[00:10:56.137]We had to look at the technical issue
[00:10:58.370]in area of the signal, and see if that worked.
[00:11:02.110]In terms of simulation, we build our simulation
[00:11:04.424]to look all of these issues.
[00:11:07.122]The way that we modeled this, there wasn't any
[00:11:10.354]model available to look at all these issues
[00:11:13.266]for an environment like the railroad.
[00:11:15.331]So we had to build this computer simulation model ourselves.
[00:11:20.014]We added all these components to it.
[00:11:21.905]We added shadows.
[00:11:23.707]We added fragmentation.
[00:11:25.847]And we added multiple channels.
[00:11:27.573]We added synchronization.
[00:11:29.018]We added authentication
[00:11:32.254]These were the issues that we built our model around.
[00:11:35.875]The testbed, I was looking at an area that would give us
[00:11:40.702]a true representation of railroad environment.
[00:11:45.101]And in Nebraska, I found Crete, Nebraska,
[00:11:48.144]which is about 30 miles from here, a good area.
[00:11:50.686]Because if you have gone through Crete here,
[00:11:53.703]there are some hills over there, there are some foliage,
[00:11:56.207]trees, bushes and all that.
[00:11:58.293]And then the city, town of Crete over there
[00:12:02.114]gave us an opportunity to be outside of town,
[00:12:05.829]out of town and then you get into the city hub,
[00:12:07.966]which is changing.
[00:12:09.821]And, in addition to that, UP and BNSF
[00:12:12.979]had the track over there, that you could test at.
[00:12:16.277]And the last thing was, the track that is in Crete
[00:12:19.971]has a parallel road to it,
[00:12:21.771]that when we didn't have access to the live track,
[00:12:25.052]we could take our cars over there
[00:12:27.183]and go and drive on the road, parallel to track
[00:12:30.757]and do our testing.
[00:12:33.272]So we got support from AAR,
[00:12:36.261]BNSF, UP, CSX and CN
[00:12:38.537]to build this testbed.
[00:12:40.046]This testbed is two and a half mile.
[00:12:42.469]It still is out there, if you go to Crete
[00:12:45.058]you can see, if you look at the railroad track
[00:12:47.699]you'll see our testbed.
[00:12:50.781]I want to show you this testbed, what it is about.
[00:12:53.219]Logically, what we have done, is we have put
[00:12:56.814]eight of these mass center and antennas on top of that.
[00:13:01.181]And they are communicating back and forth.
[00:13:04.168]And then, from one end we are coming to a DSL
[00:13:07.186]and going to the BNSF coordinates.
[00:13:09.216]Where the other side, we are coming to a microwave link
[00:13:13.118]and then going into the BNSF.
[00:13:15.019]So we have this loop here, and the train
[00:13:17.542]goes along side of this.
[00:13:20.399]This is a logical topology for it.
[00:13:24.496]If you look at the actual testbed,
[00:13:26.433]this is the actual testbed.
[00:13:28.670]We have a segment, and then the stake segment here.
[00:13:31.952]These are all access points, you see
[00:13:34.285]that we have eight of these.
[00:13:35.825]Then we have some curves here, and then you see
[00:13:38.824]there are foliage here.
[00:13:41.018]And then you see the water, the river going by here.
[00:13:42.993]So a lot of trees here, hills here,
[00:13:45.896]and then we get to area of Crete here.
[00:13:48.595]This circle that you see here
[00:13:50.536]is the coverage for each access point.
[00:13:53.211]I wanted to look at some of these
[00:13:54.594]that we don't have any overlap,
[00:13:56.543]like between this one and this one.
[00:13:58.133]And then we have some overlap,
[00:14:00.266]and looking at the signal quality, how this will change it.
[00:14:04.813]This Road 33, is the one that I was talking about
[00:14:07.483]that is parallel to the track.
[00:14:09.246]You see that, when we wanted to do our testing
[00:14:11.566]this was very nice.
[00:14:14.578]Some of these, we had to test the velocity,
[00:14:16.753]and how fast we were running.
[00:14:19.952]This Road 33 has a speed limit of 55 miles.
[00:14:23.932]And, of course, we wanted to test if for 70 to 75 miles.
[00:14:28.676]And a couple times we got into trouble,
[00:14:30.460]and we were stopped.
[00:14:31.667]We tried to explain to the officer
[00:14:33.558]that we are testing really.
[00:14:36.055]And he advised that he was wondering what we were doing,
[00:14:38.835]because you had this car,
[00:14:40.698]and you have all these antennas on top of it.
[00:14:43.372]And I had some international students in the car with me,
[00:14:46.228]and this officer wondered what we are doing
[00:14:49.127]in the middle of Nebraska.
[00:14:52.041]And so, we got a ticket on this,
[00:14:55.788]and I had hard time convincing the FRA people
[00:14:58.863]that's a part of our cost, for doing this testing.
[00:15:04.887]These are some pictures from our testbed.
[00:15:08.122]This is one of our antennas here, you see.
[00:15:10.372]You see the curve here, how the curve is,
[00:15:12.256]we wanted to see that, the foliage here.
[00:15:14.790]We looked at our testing during the winter,
[00:15:18.502]when we didn't have any leaves, in the spring and summer
[00:15:21.710]when we have a lot of leaves.
[00:15:23.604]The effect of these on the transmission is a big deal.
[00:15:27.334]One leaf of a tree, may have impact
[00:15:30.422]the same as if you have two breaks next to each other
[00:15:33.211]and you are sending the signal between.
[00:15:34.801]It impacts the transmission.
[00:15:38.779]This is relatively the sections that we had over there.
[00:15:43.461]And these are our antennas, that we put up there.
[00:15:47.043]Some of that, we were outside of Crete,
[00:15:49.332]so we had to have the power generator
[00:15:52.221]to power our radios.
[00:15:54.585]Our antennas are up there, the radio is here
[00:15:57.542]and these are my graduate students.
[00:16:00.128]A very cheap operation.
[00:16:01.766]We had the lawn chair, and you take it over there
[00:16:03.638]and connect our system.
[00:16:05.460]And as the train go by, the track is up here.
[00:16:09.519]We were monitoring the transmission.
[00:16:12.918]This is a better picture.
[00:16:14.171]Of course, BNSF was coming, to make sure
[00:16:16.521]that we are following the safety rules.
[00:16:20.544]And this was good, the power generator
[00:16:24.039]it was giving us power for about
[00:16:25.824]five to eight hours operation.
[00:16:28.239]But I wanted to monitor this 24 hours, so
[00:16:32.811]we talked to the railroad.
[00:16:34.389]And UP supported us, to get some...
[00:16:40.132]cells here, and then so we have cellular coverage here.
[00:16:43.893]Then you have some batteries here, that
[00:16:46.534]is collecting power here,
[00:16:49.292]they had bring and fix some of this
[00:16:51.154]because this was low-level
[00:16:53.087]and water was coming into our base station.
[00:16:57.565]So, UP supported this for us,
[00:17:00.343]so now had 24 hour coverage from our system.
[00:17:05.311]Again, this is some of our pictures from
[00:17:07.184]when we were testing.
[00:17:09.800]And in terms of getting on the live track,
[00:17:14.956]BNSF was pretty good supporting us with a locomotive.
[00:17:18.203]And this is the University of Nebraska test,
[00:17:20.917]that we are using and some other people were using that.
[00:17:24.850]Notice all the graffiti on this.
[00:17:27.025]Every time you bring it and
[00:17:28.892]the next day you get more graffiti on it.
[00:17:34.786]Some of our testing that's required,
[00:17:36.820]the velocity testing they told me that
[00:17:43.503]if locomotive pulls or push,
[00:17:47.400]the velocity may be different.
[00:17:48.771]And because we want to be very exact,
[00:17:50.508]they gave us two locomotives.
[00:17:53.481]At any given time one was pushing,
[00:17:55.692]and if we wanted to reverse it, the other one was pushing.
[00:18:00.067]And then we had to have another rail car here,
[00:18:02.115]because all the weight distribution on them.
[00:18:06.766]So we were doing all of this testing
[00:18:10.324]and as I mentioned, the methodology for our testing
[00:18:13.741]was to get the information from our model
[00:18:16.622]and analytical models,
[00:18:20.361]and compare it with what we were getting from the testbed.
[00:18:24.815]One of these that we did, was
[00:18:28.679]we were getting the GPS information
[00:18:30.390]from what was on the testbed, and we'd put that
[00:18:33.098]in our analytical and simulation model,
[00:18:35.339]and compare the results.
[00:18:39.088]When we were doing this testing, we found out
[00:18:40.933]that during the actual test over the track
[00:18:45.258]if you don't have good equipment to monitor this,
[00:18:48.239]you didn't have good test tools.
[00:18:50.103]So that forced us to write our own test tool.
[00:18:54.063]You note that this test tool, that graphically shows
[00:18:56.833]where we are moving, and on the side of that
[00:19:00.106]is providing all the information.
[00:19:03.068]Later on railroads find out that we have this test tools,
[00:19:06.376]and everybody was interested to get a copy of it.
[00:19:08.887]Then we send it to them, and they're using it now.
[00:19:11.418]It's very graphical test tool, for WiFi
[00:19:15.325]and monitoring where you are moving
[00:19:17.989]and will give you the throughput and RSSI
[00:19:21.443]and some of the other information.
[00:19:24.076]Also, we looked at the antenna
[00:19:28.261]placing on the rail cars.
[00:19:31.175]Mathematically we had to build the model for it
[00:19:35.048]and here visually you can see, where the antenna
[00:19:38.565]should be for better coverage.
[00:19:40.608]For example here, the antenna over here
[00:19:42.527]this red is good coverage.
[00:19:44.428]And as we can see, the coverage the other side
[00:19:47.894]of these rail cars are gonna be less and less.
[00:19:51.580]This was important, because railroads were asking us,
[00:19:54.038]should they put the antenna here, or at the edge here,
[00:19:57.411]or where is the best place?
[00:19:58.976]So we this study off of that.
[00:20:01.625]This graph is an old graph, but what it shows is
[00:20:06.284]data that we collected in the testbed.
[00:20:09.987]The characteristics of that,
[00:20:11.953]we put it in our computer simulation model.
[00:20:14.129]And we compared the simulation with the actual data.
[00:20:18.322]And we see it's matching pretty good.
[00:20:21.425]The red one is what we are getting
[00:20:22.849]from the computer simulation, and the blue
[00:20:24.870]is what we actually collected from the testbed.
[00:20:28.864]It matches pretty good there.
[00:20:30.257]The only thing, is there is a spike here,
[00:20:32.785]that our simulation, we didn't have this
[00:20:35.162]and we was digging in, to find out what happened here.
[00:20:38.533]And we went back on the radio, and we found out
[00:20:41.310]that at that point, there was a truck
[00:20:43.319]passing by our transmission, and blocked this.
[00:20:46.755]So, it affected that.
[00:20:48.839]So that was one of the things that we didn't have
[00:20:50.159]in our simulation.
[00:20:53.134]People didn't believe us, that WiFi can support mobility,
[00:20:57.047]so we generated this graph from our test bed.
[00:21:00.074]This one is showing the throughput
[00:21:02.190]versus how fast we were moving.
[00:21:04.146]For example, if we moved up to 30 miles,
[00:21:06.720]I mean here it comes to 30 mile,
[00:21:08.934]and when we turn around, you see the speed comes down,
[00:21:11.526]that we are turning around, and then going back to 30 mile.
[00:21:14.824]And at that point, we looked at the throughput
[00:21:16.878]and we saw the throughput always stayed close to 6 Mbps.
[00:21:22.516]So that showed us a different velocity.
[00:21:26.631]Here we get too close to 55 miles, and maybe 60 miles.
[00:21:31.351]Our throughput for different variation of WiFi
[00:21:35.353]has supported close to 6 Mb, 1 Mb, 4 Mb.
[00:21:40.532]These different speeds here, depends on
[00:21:43.803]different variation of WiFi,
[00:21:46.314]based on the level that we are using.
[00:21:48.326]It's not that the speed was reduced,
[00:21:50.153]it's just a different variation of that.
[00:21:52.827]I'm talking about it 802.11 a/b/g,
[00:21:55.910]different speeds that we were testing.
[00:22:01.206]After we showed that we have the right throughput,
[00:22:03.379]we wanted to know how far we are supporting the coverage
[00:22:06.703]for the WiFi.
[00:22:09.263]And again, we did some simulation
[00:22:11.527]and we read the field data.
[00:22:13.904]And, in general, what we learned from that is
[00:22:17.071]if you are moving at 50 to 70 miles per hour
[00:22:21.523]with the WiFi with a throughput about six mile,
[00:22:24.438]the distance that you get is about
[00:22:28.529]no more than one mile, 1600 meters is about,
[00:22:33.537]you feel that you can go about 1000 meters,
[00:22:36.971]one kilometer, that's a good coverage.
[00:22:39.624]Now is this good or bad?
[00:22:41.196]That's something that the railroad has to decide.
[00:22:45.870]In general, the finding that we had for WiFi was:
[00:22:49.150]that okay is good, unlicensed frequency
[00:22:53.393]supports mobility up to 70 miles.
[00:22:56.188]But the drawbacks for that was:
[00:22:58.951]the communication is limited to a mile.
[00:23:01.471]Meaning that, if the railroad is going to support
[00:23:04.893]the communication for all the tracks,
[00:23:06.882]every mile they had to put
[00:23:09.821]one of the space station, which is expensive.
[00:23:12.668]So that doesn't work for supporting the tracks all the way.
[00:23:20.359]Also, WiFi has a limited number of channels,
[00:23:23.944]doesn't support the Quality of Service.
[00:23:26.450]So it has some pluses and minuses.
[00:23:29.052]So we sat down with the railroads and we told them
[00:23:31.258]this is what we found out
[00:23:33.176]They accepted that this is not going to support
[00:23:36.688]their communication for the tracks all the way,
[00:23:40.321]but it's going to support their application
[00:23:42.802]for the yards.
[00:23:44.101]Yards, where the train is coming to the yard.
[00:23:46.643]So what they have done with this, is they took out a study
[00:23:50.300]and they have implemented WiFi in about maybe,
[00:23:54.586]about four or five miles before each yard.
[00:23:57.125]So as the train is coming to the yard,
[00:23:59.686]this WiFi connection is getting information
[00:24:02.203]from the locomotive.
[00:24:03.872]And it passes that to the people in the yard,
[00:24:06.948]so when the train gets to the yard,
[00:24:08.736]they know exactly what kind of service
[00:24:10.434]they're going to provide for that locomotive.
[00:24:13.000]So this is used.
[00:24:14.425]Also, they are using what we did here
[00:24:16.640]for their wireless communication within the yard.
[00:24:21.507]But this is not the solution for providing the
[00:24:25.571]communication along side of the track.
[00:24:30.253]So they told us, "Alright, so what is the solution
[00:24:33.402]if you want to have coverage along side of the tracks?".
[00:24:37.883]So we looked at Mobile WiMAX.
[00:24:40.614]Mobile WiMAX is a technology
[00:24:43.838]that is designed for mobility.
[00:24:47.587]They said that the distance, WiFi we had one mile,
[00:24:50.838]now they said well, you can support up to 30 miles.
[00:24:54.332]So railroads were very interested to find out,
[00:24:56.356]well 30 miles is very good, can we do that?
[00:25:00.001]So we looked at this, and
[00:25:03.564]these are some of the highlights
[00:25:07.201]for what this standard advertises:
[00:25:10.117]30 Miles, 70 Megabits per second throughput,
[00:25:13.699]it supports up to 120 miles per hour speed,
[00:25:17.215]it supports Quality of Service.
[00:25:19.022]So some of the things that WiFi didn't have,
[00:25:21.014]WiMAX is saying that it has it.
[00:25:23.301]So they ask us to look at this, and see if truly
[00:25:25.707]this is supporting that kind of thing.
[00:25:29.546]The problem with WiMAX is..
[00:25:32.919]WiFi all of us are using, this is in 2.4 GHz,
[00:25:37.112]this is license free, unlicensed, so WiFi here.
[00:25:41.705]But if you go to use WiMAX,
[00:25:43.747]WiMAX operates at 2.5 GHz, which that frequency
[00:25:48.384]is purchased by Sprint and Clearwire.
[00:25:51.777]So it's not free.
[00:25:52.723]Nobody can just setup WiMAX wireless at their home,
[00:25:57.344]or campus, and all that.
[00:25:59.895]So for us to do the testing, we had to get permission from
[00:26:06.149]Clearwire, because Nebraska was falling under Clearwire.
[00:26:09.838]Clearwire is the company that had their license,
[00:26:12.134]and Sprint.
[00:26:13.333]Clearwire didn't want to give us permission.
[00:26:15.559]They wanted to know exactly what we were doing
[00:26:17.408]and why we were doing this.
[00:26:19.205]Even though probably they never do anything in this area,
[00:26:21.785]but they didn't want to give us
[00:26:24.467]permission to use that.
[00:26:26.774]Later on they came back, and they wanted to charge us
[00:26:29.059]for the usage of the license, that frequency.
[00:26:33.305]Of course, we didn't have that funding.
[00:26:36.342]But when we started digging into this, we found out
[00:26:38.958]that the University of Nebraska
[00:26:41.408]has received permission to use some of this frequency
[00:26:45.126]for educational things a few years ago,
[00:26:47.849]before WiMAX was built.
[00:26:50.124]And so we said, "Well, we are using this
[00:26:51.819]"for educational things here."
[00:26:54.014]So we got the...
[00:26:57.561]We got the permission we could do WiMax
[00:27:00.983]around Omaha and around Lincoln, with a radius of 35 miles.
[00:27:05.818]And there wasn't anything that Sprint or Clearwire
[00:27:08.419]could do that.
[00:27:10.440]So that really gave us a big boost, to do this study.
[00:27:15.988]WiMAX is a little bit different.
[00:27:18.833]The way that we wanted to look at is the same thing.
[00:27:21.921]Those access points that we had before for WiFi,
[00:27:24.969]now we are going to put the WiMAX on it.
[00:27:27.395]And then we wanted to look at the train communication
[00:27:30.922]in multiple trains.
[00:27:32.303]Now if we have a train, this may come
[00:27:33.834]to one of these access points,
[00:27:36.022]and then go to a service gateway and the control center.
[00:27:40.715]Then another one would be connected to
[00:27:44.685]a different base station.
[00:27:46.372]The issue was here, now if we have multiple trains
[00:27:50.386]at different velocities, different direction,
[00:27:52.791]how that is going to impact the performance of that.
[00:27:56.774]So we had to build our own simulation model again,
[00:28:00.492]and our simulation model is listed here.
[00:28:05.186]The simulation model that commercially is available
[00:28:08.103]through OpNet and Qualnet are in this column.
[00:28:11.118]And then, there were some in Taiwan, Italy
[00:28:13.272]and National Institute of Standards.
[00:28:17.295]But our model that we put together
[00:28:19.216]has more of these Y's, Yes, meaning that
[00:28:22.122]supporting more of these there.
[00:28:24.322]So we built this for the railroad,
[00:28:25.820]and it's available to them, and now is a part of
[00:28:29.619]a Federal Railroad Administration tool
[00:28:31.395]that they provided to the railroads.
[00:28:34.170]But through this model, we looked at different scenarios.
[00:28:38.794]We looked at the throughput
[00:28:41.780]and these are different frequencies, different modulation
[00:28:44.575]techniques that are used.
[00:28:47.053]Our simulation, the testbed and the theory are very close.
[00:28:51.646]I mean, just look at it there.
[00:28:53.718]This was relation of course,
[00:28:55.162]gives us the best throughput here,
[00:28:57.914]that we can get close to 25 Mbps.
[00:29:04.639]The thing that was important was this graph.
[00:29:06.784]Remember the WiFi was the distance of one kilometer.
[00:29:10.471]Now look at the distance here.
[00:29:12.510]The distance here goes to 12,000 meters,
[00:29:17.113]12 kilometers, right?
[00:29:19.737]It wasn't really the 30 miles that they advertised,
[00:29:23.290]and it's not going to be at high data rate.
[00:29:25.606]If they're going to say high data rate,
[00:29:28.769]then the limit is only close to 3 1/2 miles or so.
[00:29:34.051]It's not 30 miles, but if you reduce your throughput,
[00:29:37.323]the data that your sending to something like
[00:29:39.637]less than 4 Mbps, then you can send something
[00:29:43.436]close to 11 miles or so.
[00:29:45.894]So this was much better than that.
[00:29:48.935]So this was very important, for the railroads
[00:29:51.078]to see this graph.
[00:29:52.308]Because what they were advertising,
[00:29:55.474]that you get a high data rate for high distance,
[00:29:58.685]is not really true.
[00:30:00.168]High data rate is true, but for lower distance
[00:30:05.526]and vice versa.
[00:30:06.931]So different simulation and
[00:30:10.027]scenarios we looked at.
[00:30:11.078]And there are some individual train going,
[00:30:14.175]connecting to the control center.
[00:30:16.949]Some that are going at in parallel,
[00:30:20.972]the same velocity and communicating among themselves.
[00:30:25.302]Here they're not going to the control center.
[00:30:29.763]Another scenario, you have different velocity.
[00:30:32.971]Now one is connecting to access point,
[00:30:35.380]and then access point coming to the next one.
[00:30:38.245]Trains going in the opposite directions,
[00:30:41.678]to it parallel and they're sending information
[00:30:44.218]in the form of multimedia.
[00:30:47.123]We have different trains, different types of traffic
[00:30:50.516]that they're sending.
[00:30:51.889]And what about if you're combining this WiMAX
[00:30:55.494]and some of the WiFi type traffic in one area?
[00:30:58.867]How is that going to change that?
[00:31:02.199]So we looked at all these different scenarios,
[00:31:05.403]and provided the performance study for that.
[00:31:09.106]Also, we looked at it as we were going through this,
[00:31:12.776]how fast..
[00:31:14.503]Okay, if this train is moving here,
[00:31:16.603]if it's between these two access points,
[00:31:19.191]it has to disconnect from the previous one
[00:31:22.017]and connect to the next one,
[00:31:24.000]because it's getting closer to the next one.
[00:31:26.386]Is that going to drop the throughput
[00:31:28.011]as it's doing this handoff, what we call it?
[00:31:31.089]Handoff from the previous one to the next one.
[00:31:34.280]And we did our study, and we saw that the throughput
[00:31:38.495]stays the same as we are changing.
[00:31:41.552]This study shows that here it is connected to the first AP,
[00:31:46.938]then the next one, the next one.
[00:31:49.283]This step shows that it is connecting to
[00:31:52.874]each access point.
[00:31:54.068]But the throughput stayed the same.
[00:31:56.575]This is for train moving at 70 miles per hour,
[00:31:59.574]the spacing at 5 kilometers between them,
[00:32:03.698]and the length of this is like 20 kilometers.
[00:32:08.459]And then we started looking at how much
[00:32:10.105]the load is, that it can support.
[00:32:12.992]Typically, based on our experiment that we did,
[00:32:16.965]we can support up to 120 Megabytes,
[00:32:21.313]which is a lot of information.
[00:32:22.704]That would be good application for railroad,
[00:32:24.918]will not exceed from that.
[00:32:29.986]Another thing that they wanted to do,
[00:32:32.025]is they wanted to have these cameras that are on locomotive
[00:32:36.134]in real-time, streaming that information
[00:32:39.425]to the control center.
[00:32:41.233]Now, what they are doing now is recording information.
[00:32:43.834]For example, they come to the crossing
[00:32:47.297]a highway railroad crossing.
[00:32:49.502]If anything happens they have their camera
[00:32:51.372]that is recording, and they go look at it.
[00:32:54.022]What they wanted to do, is stream that data over the network
[00:32:57.627]to the control center.
[00:33:00.503]So we did some image quality testing,
[00:33:04.541]and how the fairness of that on the throughput,
[00:33:08.886]and for both, it would do 802.16 and 802.11.
[00:33:13.640]And one access coming across really well,
[00:33:16.238]it doesn't drop at all.
[00:33:18.736]WiFi drops, so this was pretty good.
[00:33:23.229]The WiMAX video thing, we did something
[00:33:26.639]around the Omaha on campus.
[00:33:29.984]We put the camera in our car, and then we have
[00:33:33.082]the WiMAX on top of PKI.
[00:33:35.184]And we'd go around and try to steam the video through.
[00:33:38.590]And that came through well.
[00:33:42.775]Here it shows, I have the video of that.
[00:33:45.844]I won't show you today, but if you want to see that.
[00:33:48.099]The quality is really good.
[00:33:50.898]Then we did through the Elmwood Park,
[00:33:53.120]which is at the Omaha campus.
[00:33:56.694]The reason that we did Elmwood Park is,
[00:33:59.358]especially in the spring and fall
[00:34:02.965]there are many trees that were there.
[00:34:04.378]The color of these leaves are different,
[00:34:07.163]and we wanted to see how well we can capture
[00:34:09.511]the difference in different colors,
[00:34:11.258]and in terms of the transmission.
[00:34:13.228]So that turned out pretty well.
[00:34:15.137]Also we drove on a road that the trees are kind of far
[00:34:19.211]from the road, and see what the impact of this.
[00:34:23.376]And in all of this that we did,
[00:34:26.638]WiMAX turned out really well.
[00:34:29.898]This 802.16 is WiMAX, if you look at the quality
[00:34:32.957]it's pretty steady.
[00:34:35.029]This is the WiFi that had dropped.
[00:34:36.716]This is if you have a large number of station here,
[00:34:40.006]it went up to 16 stations that were transmitting video.
[00:34:45.229]So overall, with the WiMAX, what we got is
[00:34:49.545]the communication distance is much better than WiFi.
[00:34:55.559]That practically they can get about 10 miles between them.
[00:34:58.873]It's 10 miles, it's good.
[00:35:00.488]It is not the 30 miles that they were advertising.
[00:35:03.901]In terms of handoff, is pretty good.
[00:35:05.741]Quality of Service is pretty good, and some of those.
[00:35:10.292]Then we wanted to setup our WiMAX testbed.
[00:35:15.940]Two areas we picked.
[00:35:16.944]One is in Logan, Iowa, UP had a place over there.
[00:35:20.825]So they give us a tower
[00:35:22.550]and they put an antenna on top of that.
[00:35:24.858]The reason that I picked this area, this is farmland.
[00:35:27.498]You see these are all farms around it.
[00:35:29.965]And this road here, Road 44 if you see that,
[00:35:33.827]this is pretty good.
[00:35:35.269]So here was the road that we could drive relatively fast
[00:35:38.958]and there were some curves here,
[00:35:42.177]and monitor the performance of the WiMAX.
[00:35:45.765]And here you can see the coverage
[00:35:48.273]that we had from our antenna here.
[00:35:50.402]It was pretty wide, so you could to the testing.
[00:35:54.538]We did a lot of testing here.
[00:35:56.843]Then the other test that I have for WiMAX is in Ashland.
[00:36:01.852]Ashland, Nebraska, between Omaha and Lincoln.
[00:36:05.681]And the reason for that was,
[00:36:08.830]this is giving us some coverage of I-80.
[00:36:11.727]The I-80 is good here, we can test it for higher speed.
[00:36:16.928]And also, Highway 6 is there.
[00:36:22.170]If I can show this, the Highway 6 going there.
[00:36:25.084]And the I-80 here is, even though
[00:36:30.455]the coverage is small area on I-80,
[00:36:34.255]but still we could go faster, because 75 miles,
[00:36:37.412]so we are pretty safe to go 80 miles and do the testing.
[00:36:42.448]And also, we wanted to do some testing
[00:36:45.114]in Ashland, in the building,
[00:36:47.114]with the different buildings, so you have that.
[00:36:48.937]So that's another testbed that I have for the WiMAX there.
[00:36:53.205]So summary of them.
[00:36:55.614]Railroads believe that WiMAX is a good solution,
[00:37:00.133]even though it doesn't provide the 30 miles.
[00:37:02.684]The only sticking point on that is
[00:37:05.863]WiMAX operates in 2.5 GHz,
[00:37:09.290]which is a licensed frequency.
[00:37:11.335]So they have to get the license from that.
[00:37:14.638]We looked at another frequency for them,
[00:37:17.058]which is 3.65, which is different from 2.5.
[00:37:21.475]The difference 2.5, the lower one,
[00:37:24.014]it gives us better coverage.
[00:37:26.189]When you go 3.65, the coverage reduces a little bit,
[00:37:30.283]but still in terms of video and all that, was pretty good.
[00:37:33.982]Advantage of 3.65 is that the railroad
[00:37:38.066]can get the license for that without paying any money
[00:37:43.137]to Sprint and Clearwire.
[00:37:46.235]So, this is the solution that they are looking at now.
[00:37:51.496]We are meeting every quarter with the those railroads.
[00:37:55.134]And the direction that FRA Federal Railroad Administration
[00:37:59.116]is going to come in, is a combination of
[00:38:03.331]WiMAX for the track and WiFi for yard,
[00:38:07.799]getting to the yard and around the yard.
[00:38:10.461]People ask me, how about the other technology
[00:38:13.694]we hear about, 4G and all that?
[00:38:15.459]WiMAX it is a 4G technology.
[00:38:18.243]They ask me about the LTE.
[00:38:20.184]LTE what you hear on the advertisement from
[00:38:24.244]AT&T and all that, that they're using LTE.
[00:38:26.999]LTE is more a cellular technology.
[00:38:32.179]That is used basically using the same infrastructure
[00:38:36.102]that they have for cellular.
[00:38:38.578]It works well for cellular communication,
[00:38:41.457]but not for the railroad environment.
[00:38:44.534]Especially, if you have those harsh railroad environment,
[00:38:47.753]that we have.
[00:38:50.167]So, based on what we provided to FRA and railroads,
[00:38:54.806]they are taking this WiMAX.
[00:38:56.491]And now they are in the process of designing
[00:38:59.641]the hardware equipment that will go
[00:39:01.509]alongside of the track, to support the communication.
[00:39:07.969]A couple of the crews that working with me.
[00:39:10.644]Some of these my graduate students,
[00:39:13.701]they graduated and are Assistant Professor somewhere
[00:39:17.044]in the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
[00:39:21.433]He is a professor, Assistant Professor in Thailand
[00:39:24.428]and Dr. Hempel is my research professor,
[00:39:27.650]and this gentleman retired there.
[00:39:31.265]And these are some other graduate students
[00:39:34.698]that we worked with.
[00:39:35.725]This is the car that we had,
[00:39:36.752]using some of these antennas here.
[00:39:40.296]From that point, we learned that we need
[00:39:41.954]to take the university car for testing,
[00:39:44.067]this way there was gas. (laughs)
[00:39:46.686]So hopefully, that gave you an overview.
[00:39:49.187]I didn't go into a lot of technical issues
[00:39:51.126]on these models that we have done.
[00:39:53.921]But if you are interested, we have a few
[00:39:56.774]of these papers that are available,
[00:39:59.874]are typically transaction papers are there.
[00:40:02.413]And have some video of that right there, you can look at it.
[00:40:07.411]So, I'm open for questions.
[00:40:10.131](mumbled question from audience)
[00:40:14.206](mumbled question from audience)
[00:40:18.222](mumbled question from audience)
[00:40:21.013](muffled sounds from the microphone)
[00:40:25.191](muffled sounds from the microphone)
[00:40:31.301]Yes, when you are
[00:40:33.058]talking about choosing the testbed,
[00:40:38.106]for WiMAX (microphone silenced) other the I-80.
[00:40:42.345]So I wonder, how is it related
[00:40:44.670]to your choosing of the testbed.
[00:40:47.568]And with it was what?
[00:40:49.693]Uh, I-80.
[00:40:51.103]I-80, okay, sure.
[00:40:56.318]As I mentioned, one of the things that
[00:41:00.646]WiMAX was advertising,
[00:41:03.562]it supports communication at higher speed.
[00:41:07.882]They mentioned that it supports up to 120 miles per hour.
[00:41:12.598]The Crete area that we had on Highway 55,
[00:41:15.474]we could not go over 75 miles.
[00:41:18.612]So I-80 gave us a chance that at least
[00:41:22.145]we can push that speed.
[00:41:24.250]So we tried to...
[00:41:26.128]We didn't go 120 miles, I don't tell you what we went,
[00:41:28.484]but because of the higher speed.
[00:41:32.659]So the I-80, even for that 15 miles or so,
[00:41:36.949]because it's under our coverage,
[00:41:39.042]we can test it for different velocity,
[00:41:41.541]especially high velocity.
[00:41:46.233]Are there any other questions?
[00:41:50.176][Woman In Audience] I have a question
[00:41:51.009]related to the security.
[00:41:52.736]How in this test, did you look at ways that the data
[00:41:55.903]would be secure, through these various networks.
[00:41:58.119]I mean, you know, that's something
[00:42:00.082]to always be concerned with, this kind of data
[00:42:02.427]and the things that the railroad carries.
[00:42:04.348]Sure, excellent question, very good.
[00:42:07.556]Each of these technologies,
[00:42:11.114]WiFi and WiMAX, provide some security on it.
[00:42:14.751]Like WiFi, when you are using here, you know
[00:42:16.934]you have security that is at the application level.
[00:42:21.749]WiMAX also provides security, too.
[00:42:25.093]But there were some critical applications,
[00:42:27.397]but the railroad wanted us to go beyond that.
[00:42:30.346]For example, their vision is at some point
[00:42:33.780]all the functionalities of the locomotive
[00:42:36.177]will be controlled remotely, and through the wireless.
[00:42:40.626]In that case, they wanted to have
[00:42:42.931]truly a secure environment.
[00:42:46.180]Actually, this is a part of what we are going to study next.
[00:42:49.221]For that kind of application, you get even
[00:42:52.704]in more detailed security, than what the standard is.
[00:42:57.032]But for most applications, they rely on the security
[00:43:00.129]that comes with the technology.
[00:43:03.208][Woman In Audience] Was there any collaboration
[00:43:04.224]with the Department of Defense on some of this,
[00:43:07.344]that some of the things that they may have,
[00:43:09.165]or things that they can provide, or test data,
[00:43:11.572]or anything of that nature?
[00:43:13.086]No, not at this time.
[00:43:19.187](muffled microphone sounds)
[00:43:22.592]Thanks Hamid.
[00:43:23.581]I think it's always good to see
[00:43:26.456]what we do all over the country
[00:43:28.530]and that consists of what we often do for roadways.
[00:43:30.650]It's good to see the application for railways
[00:43:34.538]and understand that all modes are interested in this
[00:43:37.922]and that are making progress on it.
[00:43:41.246]We can't predict the future,
[00:43:42.767]but a lot of times we work with technology
[00:43:45.126]and things catch up on you.
[00:43:46.467]Do you see anything on the horizon,
[00:43:47.979]that will also be of use to this kind of stuff?
[00:43:52.053]Thank you.
[00:43:55.177]The thing that I see is,
[00:43:58.280]putting this WiMAX
[00:44:00.231]again, requires heavy infrastructure investment.
[00:44:03.917]Meaning that they have to have these poles,
[00:44:07.204]these antennas every...
[00:44:09.430]we predicted every 10 to 15 miles, okay?
[00:44:12.702]Even in the future, if you push this to 20 miles,
[00:44:15.878]still they have to have this.
[00:44:18.054]So what I see is,
[00:44:19.801]the cellular network at some point
[00:44:23.129]truly be in a coverage that covers everywhere.
[00:44:27.112]If that covers, than the railroad
[00:44:29.262]don't have to invest in that infrastructure themselves.
[00:44:33.817]But are we going to get to that point?
[00:44:36.289]Are the cellular providers interested in supporting
[00:44:39.539]an area, that you may have 20 people living over there?
[00:44:43.577]Putting infrastructure over there, that's the question.
[00:44:46.518]In terms of the lesson.
[00:44:47.829]In terms of the technology,
[00:44:50.571]always we are doing something in their communication.
[00:44:53.124]We are always pushing that envelope
[00:44:56.457]to have more data rate and better error rate,
[00:45:01.577]and better coverage.
[00:45:03.590]So, there is a standard
[00:45:06.765]that we refer to as 802.20.
[00:45:10.275]Not 802.11, but 802.20, which is not a standard yet,
[00:45:14.548]but is a committee that are looking at that
[00:45:17.116]and I'm a member of that.
[00:45:18.925]That may offer a different technology.
[00:45:21.212]But probably that's not until probably seven, eight years.
[00:45:25.914]Because the code (microphone issues) after that.
[00:45:31.613]Are there any other questions?
[00:45:36.093]One of the big pushes right now
[00:45:38.651]are in connected vehicle.
[00:45:40.602]ATS, right, where the roadway and the vehicles
[00:45:43.265]are connected to the infrastructure.
[00:45:45.561]And it would seem to me, obviously, that the railway
[00:45:47.903]would be part of that as well.
[00:45:50.319]Is this work, do you work in this area at all?
[00:45:52.882]Do you see any applicably
[00:45:55.257]to that connected vehicle initiative?
[00:45:58.411]Thank you, that's a very good question.
[00:46:02.588]You know, some of this connectivity, as I mentioned,
[00:46:06.243]through WiFi, because it supports mobility,
[00:46:09.525]that can be implemented in WiFi.
[00:46:11.650]It's relatively inexpensive,
[00:46:13.710]for communication between the vehicles,
[00:46:16.466]and communication from vehicle to some stationary.
[00:46:22.324]The issue is that, when you are doing that,
[00:46:26.368]who is going to control the information,
[00:46:28.920]and some of the privacy issues that get involved here.
[00:46:32.516]But what I have done, is I'm looking at
[00:46:36.213]one of the areas that I talk to you later,
[00:46:40.729]they're looking at measuring
[00:46:44.470]the speed of the traffic in different congested areas.
[00:46:48.000]So, they mark the car from Point A
[00:46:51.138]and how it takes to get to Point B.
[00:46:54.168]The way that people are doing this,
[00:46:56.301]are two different methods.
[00:46:57.669]One method is, is new cars all of them have Bluetooth.
[00:47:01.825]And this Bluetooth are on, and
[00:47:05.229]what you can do, you can have a passive device
[00:47:09.189]that monitors the Bluetooth
[00:47:11.564]and address of that Bluetooth from one point.
[00:47:15.553]And then, if you can do that in another point,
[00:47:19.008]you find out how long the test taking to get between that.
[00:47:24.441]That is kind of similar thing that you are doing.
[00:47:28.902]I'm interested to do this, not only with Bluetooth,
[00:47:31.669]because not all the cars have Bluetooth, the new ones do.
[00:47:35.588]But there are other elements in the car,
[00:47:37.642]that they have some form of transmissions,
[00:47:40.202]that if you can capture that kind of transmission.
[00:47:42.681]Transmission meaning, it's not really wireless,
[00:47:44.907]it's just the characteristics of the electromagnetic field
[00:47:48.808]that that engine generates.
[00:47:50.950]I can measure that, and from Point A to Point B
[00:47:53.449]and do that.
[00:47:56.233]So there are a lot of similarities between
[00:47:59.231]vehicle to vehicle, and train to train.
[00:48:03.018]You know, the one that I showed,
[00:48:05.104]two trains are going in the opposite or parallel
[00:48:08.362]and how the communication between them is going to be.
[00:48:11.299]It comes back to two vehicles, if there communicating
[00:48:16.009]to a base station on the side, how that transmission
[00:48:19.362]is going to impact that,
[00:48:20.723]in the technical side of it.
[00:48:23.416]So, yes, they're very, very much connected.
[00:48:26.484]So that's why we come to Maxi, to get your direction.
[00:48:29.536](laughs)
[00:48:33.632]Thanks Hamid.
[00:48:34.943]Well thanks, for giving a very good presentation,
[00:48:38.513]and so we'll have extra, I will see you around
[00:48:40.856]doing other work for Maxi in the future.
[00:48:42.752]So, thank you.
[00:48:43.696]Sure, thank you, very much.
[00:48:45.905](microphone screeching)
[00:48:46.851]To all the graduate students working here,
[00:48:50.752]under the direction of Dr. Ellett.
[00:48:53.107]If you are interested to working in these railroad things,
[00:48:56.694]please let me know, or contact Dr. Ellett.
[00:49:01.147]There are always projects, that the railroads are coming.
[00:49:04.289]Maxi has supported me for two projects.
[00:49:07.282]If you don't mind, maybe I can mention
[00:49:08.758]the project that is supported now.
[00:49:11.246]Actually, this is a very interesting project.
[00:49:13.899]What we are trying to do,
[00:49:15.287]Railroads came to us and proposed this to us,
[00:49:18.693]that we do this study.
[00:49:20.617]You have a railroad track, and sometimes construction
[00:49:23.482]is going on on the track.
[00:49:25.807]And the construction worker coming to fix something
[00:49:28.530]on the track, they don't want to shut down the whole track,
[00:49:32.471]but they have to know when the train is coming,
[00:49:34.542]so they get their stuff out of the way.
[00:49:37.774]You know that traini coming at 70 miles an hour,
[00:49:40.796]they cannot stop right away.
[00:49:42.437]So they have to know that something is at least a mile,
[00:49:44.905]an mile and a half.
[00:49:46.592]And sometimes because of the time and the tunnel,
[00:49:49.924]they cannot see where that crew is.
[00:49:53.593]So the project that Maxi and Dr. Ellett is supporting me is,
[00:49:58.904]what we want to do is we put some sensors,
[00:50:02.072]like a couple miles way, wireless sensor,
[00:50:04.552]that as the train go by, we detect a electromagnetic field
[00:50:08.871]that the locomotive generates.
[00:50:11.350]And then based on that, we can determine the velocity
[00:50:14.285]and the direction.
[00:50:15.820]And wireless, see we can give that information to the crew,
[00:50:20.621]that this train is coming, and is going to be here
[00:50:22.888]in the next five minutes.
[00:50:24.585]Get out of the way, or move your things.
[00:50:27.024]People tried to do this with cameras.
[00:50:29.523]You know, they have a high-speed camera
[00:50:31.766]that we can see a mile away.
[00:50:34.125]But, of course, through the curves and tunnels
[00:50:36.991]that doesn't work.
[00:50:38.036]They tried to do radar.
[00:50:40.099]It doesn't work, because you have be in the line of sight.
[00:50:42.851]Still it has limitations.
[00:50:45.482]So, we are looking at other solution
[00:50:49.456]and Union Pacific has supported us
[00:50:52.156]with a match for Maxi.
[00:50:55.719]I look forward that, that will make a big difference,
[00:50:58.768]in terms of safety of the rail.
[00:51:01.378]What we are doing now, believe it or not,
[00:51:03.612]they tell me that they put a person a mile away.
[00:51:07.081]And that person has to stand over there,
[00:51:09.539]and watch if train is coming.
[00:51:11.519]But the problem is, that person cannot have any distraction.
[00:51:15.960]They found out that sometimes that phones,
[00:51:19.239]or whatever they have, sometimes they listen to music,
[00:51:22.064]and they're looking, but that music
[00:51:24.580]their mind is somewhere else
[00:51:25.995]And then they banned everything, so these people
[00:51:28.759]cannot have anything on them, they just stand over there.
[00:51:31.866]But then they realize they get tired of standing over there
[00:51:34.273]for 45 minutes and looking at.
[00:51:36.386]So they step out, or their mind is somewhere else,
[00:51:38.877]and train comes.
[00:51:40.522]So all kinds of problems, it is really truly a safety issue
[00:51:43.489]that we are looking at.
[00:51:47.487]Thank you.
[00:51:48.444](audience applause)

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2012 MATC Fall Lecture Series: Hamid Sharif

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