Management of Virtualized Railway Applications

Robust, reliable, and secure communications are essential for efficient railway operation and keeping employees and passengers safe. The Future Railway Mobile Communication System (FRMCS) is a global standard aimed at providing innovative, essential, and high-performance communication applications in railway transport. In comparison with the legacy communication system (GSM-R), it provides high data rates, ultra-high reliability, and low latency. The FRMCS architecture will also benefit from cloud computing, following the principles of the cloud-native 5G core network design based on Network Function Virtualization (NFV). In this paper, an approach to the management of virtualized FRMCS applications is presented. First, the key management functionality related to the virtualized FRMCS application is identified based on an analysis of the different use cases. Next, this functionality is synthesized as RESTful services. The communication between application management and the services is designed as Application Programing Interfaces (APIs). The APIs are formally verified by modeling the management states of an FRMCS application instance from different points of view, and it is mathematically proved that the management state models are synchronized in time. The latency introduced by the designed APIs, as a key performance indicator, is evaluated through emulation.