The Railways in India is a large network owned by the Ministry of Railways, Government of India that operates India’s National Railway System. It is continually expanding to accommodate more trains and more routes to facilitate growing passenger demand.
The national rail network comprises a total route length of 68,043 km, a total track length of 128,305 km and 7,325 stations. India’s National Rail network is the fourth-largest in the world (after those of the United States, China and Russia). 36.83% of routes are double or multi-tracked. 58,812 km of all the routes have been electrified.
Making India’s Railways safe
The Ministry of Railways has created an Indian Railway Safety Security Policy and has commenced to implement this policy.
They have taken steps to install Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) Camera in all train coaches including EMUs and passenger trains. CCTV Cameras have already been provided in 2931 coaches and Indian Railways is endeavouring to gradually provide in more coaches in order to enhance safety and security of the passengers.
This has created a lot of demand for rugged communication equipment like Ethernet Switches, Wi-Fi and 4G/LTE routers and other such communication equipment that can power cameras.
Customer requirement
Safety cameras are to be positioned along the coaches at regular intervals for the entire length. The video from each camera is sent back to a monitoring station where it is recorded. The typical requirement is for GPS BASED PUBLIC ADDRESS & PASSENGER INFORMATION SYSTEM (PAPIS) & LED DESTINATION BOARDS IN AC AND NON- AC COACHES, and it means the supply of “complete system including all related equipment, such as main processing unit (MPU), GSM/3G/4G modem, GPS system, LCD display units, PA system, Wi-Fi and LED display unit for outside and inside of the coach.
The brief was to:
˙ Utilise locally available high performance IP cameras and secure the data against hacking, using AES based
encryption.
˙ Provide no loss in performance of video or operator control.
˙ Provide a resilient and robust solution even in the event of equipment damage/failure.
˙ To facilitate rapid deployment, using AI to auto configure network and re-configure inseconds.
˙ Incorporate transmission for additional signalling, alarms & display equipment.
˙ Reduce infrastructure installation and support costs by maximising he number of node connections on a
single fibre loop, and also the ability to directly connect to 110 VDC power on the train, than eliminding power
adapters.
˙ Secure all data communication using AES based encryption.
The Solution
Pantherun provided a combination of their secure AMD FPGA based L2 and L3 switches, so a Copper/ Fiber ring along the length of the train, could connect all the L2 switches that were powering Cameras, and could be networked together while also implementing AES based encryption in real-time, without latency that affects the performance and throughput of the network. Here is a picture of the Pantherun IP67 compliant FPGA based switch.
The train was divided into 15 sections, each with its own Secure L3 switch, with a redundant backup, and these L3 switches acted as the gateway for the local secure L2 switches to enter the redundant Copper/Fiber network. This architecture ensured that any faults in the network could be localised to one section and would not affect the whole network.As train add and remove carriages in different stations, AI was used to quickly detect network settings and re-configure the whole train network in seconds.
The architecture is as follows –
Secure communication was achieved using a combination of AES based encryption using Pantherun’s patented AI based key generation technology, where in all data was encrypted at the L2 level and decrypted by the destination at the L3 level.
Following is a block diagram of the internals of the design within the AMD FPGA
The system is architected to not only cover video surveillance, but also audio assistance on the train. All of this is accomplished using redundancy at the Copper/fibre ring level.
