Micro versus Macro Antenna Corridor for Trains Equipped with FSS Windowpanes

The focus of this paper is on the railway wireless communications in which propagating EM waves penetrate directly into the trains through their windowpanes. These low-loss windowpanes are created based on the frequency selective surface (FSS) concept and are known as FSS windowpanes. In this paper, the measured port-to-port pathloss for a micro antenna corridor structure is presented and compared to that of the macro antenna corridor for a typical single-deck train. The comparison between the two types of antenna corridors for railway communications indicates that a micro antenna corridor yields reduced overall pathloss along the railway track. Furthermore, measured Doppler effects for both corridors are presented. A deeper study of Doppler reveals that the impact of the scattering by the catenary masts for the macro antenna corridor is significant. In contrast, for the micro antenna corridor, the direct path from the antenna to the windowpane of a train is the dominant path determining the overall pathloss. This information is helpful in simulations of the antenna corridor pathloss for railway communications.