Huawei and Partners Bring Ethiopian Railway Network to Life with eLTE Solution
[Shanghai, China, October 12, 2015] The completion of the Addis Ababa City Light Rail Transit project, a new railway line connecting the Ethiopian capital’s urban centers and industrial areas, was jointly announced by Huawei and some of the other organizations behind its development today.
Under the project, Huawei provided several of the key technologies forming its Digital Urban Rail Transportation Solution – including end-to-end eLTE and related communication systems – to support vehicle-mounted devices and dispatching systems provided by fellow project partner Shenzhen Communication Technology. China Railway Eryuan Engineering Group also backed the initiative through its development of the railway’s signaling system. The resulting package is the first of LTE technology based solutions to be implemented in an African urban railway network.
Addis Ababa City Light Rail Transit operation official commencement ceremony
Underpinning the demand for these new technologies is the vast increase in the application of video services in urban rail transit networks. These include surveillance-, monitoring- and passenger information-systems, all of which consume considerable bandwidth and give rise to new challenges in terms of operating efficiencies, reliability, and railway network maintenance.
To address these challenges, Huawei leveraged its 4G LTE, high definition (HD) video and optical transmission technologies to create a version of its integrated Digital Urban Rail Transportation Solution specially tailored for the Addis Ababa Light Rail. The solution includes a highly reliable train-to-ground communication platform complete with all the necessary services systems, including an eLTE wireless network, a transport network, an IP-based fixed network, communication power supply, service telephone service and a closed-circuit television system.
The major advantages of the eLTE wireless network specifically include:
• Its ultra-wideband technology, which enables wireless dispatching and various other services, including voice trunking and single-network ticketing data management, thereby reducing the need for trackside devices and lowering maintenance costs.
• Its nine-level hierarchical quality of service technology, which ensures critical real-time services designed to meet the demands of real-time wireless big data transmissions, such as those resulting from the ticketing system, while supporting concurrent voice dispatching and data transmissions.
• Its utilization of LTE cell technology to provide a wireless network that covers 1,200 meters with just one cellular-based eLTE cell. The structure requires just four baseband units and nine radio remote units. It also provides over 150,000 hours of mean time between failures, which means a reliability rate of over 99.999 percent. These structures can be deployed repeatedly along the railway line, an arrangement that helps reduce maintenance cost and complexity.
As for network device deployment, Huawei avoided duplicating network capacity and minimized the investment required for each device by basing the Addis Ababa City Light Rail systems it created on a single backbone network that supports multiple services, including communication, signaling, supervisory control and data acquisition and fare collection.
For storage of video surveillance data meanwhile, the solution was built with a centralized facility for housing both North-South line and East-West line footage, again helping keep costs to a minimum.
In terms of collecting the video data, high-definition IP cameras and access devices were deployed alongside the tracks. These support both HD video browsing and standard definition storage.
Numerous interactive tests were conducted on the urban rail transportation solution and other services and peripheral devices to ensure stable operation.
The light rail transit system is expected to drastically change life in Addis Ababa, where population density is high and most still travel by road, resulting in heavy traffic congestion.
The first phase of this project involved the construction of two railway lines – a North-South- and East-West-passageway – that spans 31 kilometers and includes one control center and 39 stations, two of which are underground. Further development phases may soon follow.
