Fault tolerant Ethernet network model for control and entertainment in railway transportation systems

In this paper, simulations are run to study the performance of a fault tolerant control system over a single Gigabit Ethernet network used in train wagons. The network is assumed to carry control data as well as additional entertainment traffic. The network consists of a Controller handling the sensor-to-actuator data and another Entertainment Server carrying video and Internet application packets. Fault-tolerance is introduced by reallocating loads in case of Controller failure. Additionally, various qualities for the entertainment traffic carried by the network are used. OPNET was used to estimate the maximum allowable entertainment traffic that can be added to satisfy real-time sensor-to-actuator packet end-to-end delay constraints.