A Scalable and Secure Communication Architecture for Railway Systems

With the increasing scale of railway systems, the number of terminal devices and the frequency of data exchange have continued to grow, leading to challenges such as insufficient flexibility and maintenance difficulties. To enhance data management and system scalability, this work proposes a data-centric train communication architecture, which integrates the data distribution service (DDS) and the train real-time data protocol (TRDP), combining the publish/subscribe model with existing train communication mechanisms. The proposed architecture supports synchronized data dissemination for multiple devices, topic-oriented data subscription, and shared key generation based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). A prototype system has also been implemented and tested to validate the feasibility of the proposed architecture.