Safeguarding railway communication signals from radiated intentional EMI from a train

This article proposes a new technique to reduce the effect of low-power jammers that operate in radio frequency to meddle with control station-to-train communications and also evaluates the existing techniques serving the same purpose. The railway transportation systems form a part of the critical infrastructures in industrial countries and the railway signaling, which involves the communication between the trains and the control stations is very critical. However, the intentional electromagnetic interferences (IEMIs) caused by low power electromagnetic jammers functioning in railway environments pose a vicious threat. Jammers can be utilized to disrupt the radio communications of railway operators. In this paper, we suggest the use of phased antenna arrays to safeguard the railway communication signals from intentional EMIs from low power jammers. The performance of the currently used mitigation methodologies is also evaluated in this work. A comparative analysis against the existing works shows that the forward gain of the antenna is almost doubled using the proposed method and the front-to-back ratio of the radiated beam is improved by 3.4drawbacks caused by the existing mitigation methodologies that can be concluded from the detailed evaluation of the current mitigation schemes.