Reliable architecture for a two-wagon switched ethernet train control network

This paper studies a networked control system onboard of train wagons. The network uses strictly switched Ethernet which is a shared backbone for both control and entertainment loads. Sensors and actuators communicate with a dedicated controller with different sampling periods. Simultaneously, using the same network, DVD video streaming and WiFi access is supported by a dedicated entertainment server. The model under study has two identical wagons, each containing a dedicated controller and a dedicated entertainment server. The system is shown to be fault-tolerant at the controller level. It can survive the failure of up to three out of the four machines. All possible failure sequences are stimulated using OPNET Network Modeler. A communication scheme is proposed in order to minimize performance degradation due to the failure of one or more machines. The simulations are used to monitor packet end-to-end delays in order to gauge system performance, guaranteeing zero control packet loss.