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

The next generation of railway customer-oriented services are expected to generate a large volume of data ( ≈ 10s 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 paper, 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.