Towards Mobile Data Centres: Provision of End-to-End 10 and 40 Gbit/s Ethernet Train Backbones on International Rolling Stock

• Published in: IEEE transactions on vehicular technology Vol. 73; no. 2; pp. 1890 - 1898
• Main Authors: Ngobigha, Felix, Koczian, Geza, Walker, Stuart D.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01-02-2024; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Active network devices; Cable shielding; Carriages; Communication cables; Communication networks; Connectors; Crosstalk; Customer services; ETB train regions; Ethernet; ethernet consist network; Passenger safety; Passenger services; passive components; Power cables; quadrupole; Rail transportation; Rolling stock; Trains; twisted-quad cable
• ISSN: 0018-9545; 1939-9359
• DOI: 10.1109/TVT.2023.3315516

The next generation of railway customer-oriented services are expected to generate a large volume of data (<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">\approx</tex-math></inline-formula> 10 s of TB). As a result, passengers' applications, safety, security, and Internet-on-Board (IoB) sensors challenge current Train Communication Networks. With the present Ethernet Train Backbone (ETB) specification of just 100 Mbit/s in total, railway passenger services will not support intelligent, seamlessly connected and mobile media on-board trains. In this article, we propose a novel ETB design with experimental results demonstrating end-to-end 10 Gbit/s and 40 Gbit/s throughput results over existing conducting media on commercial railway carriages. This is equivalent to 100 Mbit/s per user on real-world railway rolling stock and shows that standard RailCat 5e cabling and new rail-approved 10 Gbit/s ETB active nodes (switches) fully support emerging trends and future-proof ETB configurations.