Study on the Optimization of Hybrid Network Topology for Railway Cars

Abstract

In the train system, railway vehicles are connected in a line. Therefore, this feature should be considered in composing network topology in a train system. Besides, inter-car communication should be distinguished from in-car communication.As for the inter-car communication, the hybrid topology was proposed to use rather than the conventional ring, star, daisy-chain, and bus topologies. In the hybrid topology, a number of cars are bound to be a group. Then star topology is used for the communication in a group and daisy-chain topology is used for the communication between groups. Hybrid topology takes the virtue of both star and daisy-chain topologies. Hence it maintains communication speed with reducing the number of connecting cables between cars. Therefore, it is important to choose the number of cars in a group to obtain higher performance. In this paper, we focus on the optimization of hybrid topology for railway cars. We first assume that the size of data and the frequency of data production for each car is identical. We also assume that the importance for the maximum number of cables to connect cars is variable as well as the importance of the communication speed. Separated weights are granted to both importance and we derive the optimum number of cars in a group for various number of cars and weights.