An mmWave beamforming scheme for disaster detection in high speed railway

As the operating speed of high speed railway (HSR) ever increases, the train operation safety requirement is getting stricter and stricter. Among the various environment monitoring technologies, the microwave radar detection technology tends to civilian use and plays an important role in environmental safety monitoring. Though rich continuous spectrum resources are available in millimeter wave (mmWave) bands, in order to overcome unfavorable path loss, directional beamforming is usually used as an essential technology to concentrate radio signal radiation energy. To ensure the safety of train operation, we propose an mmWave beamforming scheme for railway disaster detection. In this proposed scheme, the concerned area around railways is divided into different detection areas with different danger sensitivity levels. Considering propagation characteristics of radio signals with different frequency bands within a wide frequency range, the antenna array generates multiple beams with different beam widths in different frequency bands simultaneously, and the multiple beams are responsible for different detection areas. Moreover, different detection resolutions are set for different detection areas to apply to different beam scanning schemes. Performance analysis results have demonstrated that the proposed beamforming scheme can not only greatly improve the detection efficiency, but also decrease the false alarm rate.