| With the ever-growing need for mobile high-speed access, there is an apparent demand to extend access towards mass transportation vehicles. We propose a novel networking paradigm for the railway system. The architecture realizes spatial diversity and transparency to mobile devices. A link-layer design approach of the architecture, with the use of erasure coding, is investigated.; Two general transmission schemes are proposed. In the information raining approach, all repeaters in the train vicinity blindly broadcast segments, and each vehicle antenna tunes to one of the repeaters in attempt to receive segments. In the second approach, we seek for the optimal transmission scheme, in terms of system throughput, by controlling power and matching between repeaters and antennas. Individually, power control and matching problem are both shown to be NP-complete; three matching and two power allocation heuristics are proposed. Simulations show that information raining is inferior to heuristics, particularly in interference-limited environment. |
