The Trials are being performed on a real railway network represented by a railway circuit devoted to conformance approval of new trains and machinery, with real sensors, placed on ground on or near the rails (wayside sensors), and with a fully operational diagnostic train, preexisting to DINoS5G but fitted with DINoS5G communication facilities. 

A flexible communication platform, leveraging on integrated resources from a hybrid Satellite and 5G communication infrastructure, would meet – in an optimal way with possible trade offs – the requirements of such Maintenance application. The Project has indeed designed and prototyped such a hybrid infrastructure, by providing what we call the DINoS5G Architecture. The essence of the Architecture is to provide LDUs with both 5G RAN and SAT RAN access, to be used in alternation or in combination, depending on requirements and current network conditions, load and availability. 

The Project has originated from looking at the application problem faced by any major railway infrastructure operator: several hundreds, currently, and several thousands, in the future, of diagnostic units (LDUs, Local Data Units) need to dynamically transfer data collected from rail and environment sensors to a limited number of central data units (CDUs, Central Data Units) in charge of processing data, perform business intelligence with them, and provide ”predictive”  maintenance instead of just “failure-event-triggered” interventions. The current communication legacy available to LDUs and CDUs may not meet very much needed requirements like massive data transfer, minimum latency and availability of underlying resources, particularly in the thousands of miles covered by a railway network outside urban areas.

Trial use cases include Satellite network inventory, Service provisioning as proper chaining of network resources with given performance parameters and SAT/5G network KPI monitoring.

5G network or SAT network conditions and steering solutions are automatically “computed” through a multi-domain service orchestration, both in terrestrial and non-terrestrial domain, which assumes management of virtualized resources. 
The platform developed and set up by the Project is currently undergoing extensive on-field trials, to characterize  functionality and end-to-end performance of different delivery chains from LDUs to CDUs, obtainable from all possible outcomes of steering decisions. 

Outcomes from the Trials will be fed into a Validation process, to obtain indications whether the DINos5G platform would be worth being engineered and scaled-up to a geographical extension and whether a workable business plan can be drafted for operational exploitation.