Railway signaling systems are computerized equipment vital for the guarantee of the safe running of trains. Because of the computerization of railway signaling systems, the importance of a networking interface between these pieces of equipment is increasing. Thus, it is important to have a reliable and safe communication link between signaling equipment. Recently, network technologies have been applied in a real-time industrial control system, and also there are several studies applying computer network technology in vital control systems such as railway signaling systems. To deploy these computer network related studies in railway signaling systems, implementation costs, transmitted reliability, safety assurance technique and compatibility etc, are considered. The computer network protocol for railway signaling systems has an important advantage over the widely used Ethernet in terms of deterministic characteristics. In this paper, we propose computer network technology, especially the Ethernet, for railway signaling systems. The computer network characteristics of real-time industrial control systems and vital railway signaling systems are presented in this paper. This algorithm presented is based on switched Ethernet technology with a redundancy scheme. Also we demonstrate the experimental results of the proposed network algorithm.

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