Exploiting redundancy and path diversity for railway signalling resiliency

Railway signalling systems play a key role in the intelligent rail transportation. These systems rely on underlying communication networks that carry state information and commands between the control centre and the train fleet. These networks are currently involved in a migration process towards IP technology. Within this migration, the Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) technology in communication core networks is becoming ubiquitous. Besides, in the end-side equipments, the adoption of TCP/IP protocol stack allows the introduction of new protocols, such as MPTCP, that provide end-to-end redundancy in equipments with multiple network interfaces. However, there are still two open questions before being able to introduce this technology in railway signalling networks. On the one hand, the standard Multipath TCP (MPTCP) protocol does not define how an effective redundancy can be applied in equipments with a unique network interface. On the other, redundancy without path diversity does not provide the needed resiliency for facing correlated communication errors. In this paper, we present two contributions to address these two open points. Firstly, we define and test a MPTCP extension that combines spatial and temporal redundancy. Secondly, we describe a procedure for combining MPTCP and MPLS technology in order to guarantee the required end-to-end path diversity.

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