Performance Evaluation of Fault Tolerant Switched Ethernet Architecture for Railway Signal System

In high reliability systems for industrial network such as railway signal system, fieldbus protocols have been known to satisfy the real-time and fault tolerant requirements. But, the application of fieldbus has been limited due to the high cost of hardware and software, and the difficulty in interfacing with multi-vendor products. Therefore, as an alternative to fieldbus, the computer network technology, especially Ethernet(IEEE 802.3), is being adapted to the industrial network. In this paper, we propose a switched Ethernet based railway signal system because of its very promising prospect for industrial application due to the elimination of uncertainties in the network operation. In addition, we propose the redundancy architecture for the reliability of network components. More specifically, this paper presents an analytical performance evaluation of switched Ethernet for railway signal system, and shows experimental evaluation of redundancy architecture.