Investigation on the application of a time-triggered protocol aboard trains

Modern trains are equipped with a communication network to exchange data among the numerous electric/electronic devices that nowadays are installed in the railways vehicles. Since a few years the train communication network (TCN) protocol has been chosen as the standard for the communication network aboard trains. A crucial issue for this application is the achievement of higher levels of dependability while fulfilling the transmission needs. Recently communication networks have been developed, built up around time-triggered protocols, that accommodate powerful techniques to make dependable the network behavior. After reviewing the characteristics of TCN, the paper illustrates two commercialized time-triggered protocols, namely time-triggered protocol and FlexRay, and investigates their application aboard trains