In this paper, we investigate the impact of electromagnetic interference (EMI) on the quality of a Global System for Mobile communications - Railways (GSM-R) ground to train radio link. Scenarios of radiated electromagnetic (EM) disturbances applied to a Gaussian minimum shift keying (GMSK) based receiver, potentially impairing the communication quality are assessed. The objective is to establish a link between the disturbance characteristics of the interference and the received communication quality; the physical layer is considered. A GSM-R communication chain is modeled. Radiated EMI perturbations are injected to study, at the receiver, the bit error rate (BER). The signal plus interference characteristics are analyzed to detect the interference. In a second step, this work will be used to identify suitable criteria to implement an automatic EMI detection and identification system.
