Palm Beach County Deploys RuggedCom RuggedSwitch™ to Network Traffic Control Devices
Company Overview
Palm Beach County, centered 60 miles north of Miami Florida, is the largest county southeast of the Mississippi River and covers more territory than the states of Rhode Island or Delaware. The county Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) is responsible for managing a substantial network of roads including over 1500 intersections, and related traffic infrastructure. The Palm Beach County ITS Operations Facility serves as the nerve center for traffic management and deployment of ITS projects in the county. From there, all Palm Beach County ITS devices are monitored and controlled. The MPO has evaluated and is now implementing Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and communications technology-based solutions to address the age-old challenge of traffic growth, making travel in the region safer and more efficient.
Modernizing the ITS Infrastructure
Palm Beach County began modernizing their ITS infrastructure in the late 1990's. Beginning in late 2001, they conducted an exhaustive evaluation of technology solutions, exploring options that ranged from upgrading existing equipment to complete system replacement. After considerable review, a decision was made to interconnect all new traffic controllers over a 1Gbps fiber optical Ethernet communication backbone with 100Mbps downlinks to control equipment. This gave the county the ability to continuously monitor and manage all of their traffic signals in real-time. In parallel, they began the replacement of analog video equipment with digital video devices, allowing video signals to be encoded for immediate transmission across the network. This conversion allowed the MPO to roll-out more cameras while using a smaller quantity of fiber.
Field-Hardened RuggedCom® Switches Chosen
The comprehensive review evaluated Ethernet switches, traffic controllers, and video encoders from many different vendors. Devices were to be located in traffic control cabinets throughout the county. With a sub tropical climate and frequent electrical storms creating extreme operating environments, only the most rugged devices would be considered. That's why Palm Beach County chose RuggedCom's RuggedSwitch™ family of field hardened, fully managed Ethernet switches for all of their traffic control cabinets. Rated for reliable operation in temperatures ranging from -40ºC to +85ºC, and featuring RuggedCom Zero-Packet-Loss™ technology for immunity to electromagnetic interference, the RuggedSwitch family easily exceeded the NEMA TS 2 environmental requirements for traffic control equipment mounted in curbside cabinets.
With plans to add more intersection cameras and to introduce a video detection and surveillance system, Palm Beach County required IGMP Snooping capability in the switches they chose. RuggedSwitch IGMP Snooping dynamically controls multicast communication of video signals. This allows Palm Beach County to efficiently contain the bandwidth required to propagate video streams across their network.
Palm Beach County's network architecture is divided into a core and edge. Core switches supplied by Foundry Networks, are located in environmentally stable locations while the RuggedCom-supplied edge switches are located in harsh traffic cabinet environments. The network is organized into ring-based architectures using RuggedSwitch enhanced Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (eRSTP™ ) which reduces standard RSTP network recovery time of 200 to 800ms per hop, to less than 5ms. With Palm Beach County's average network ring of 30 intersections, network failures result in a maximum of 4 frames of video lost before network recovery. Another benefit of eRSTP is that it allows the county to structure rings containing up to 80 switches versus the maximum of 30 allowed by RSTP. Full interoperability between eRSTP and standard RSTP networks ensures seamless integration with the Foundry Networks core network while delivering the unique advantages of RuggedCom technology.
Implementation
Palm Beach County rolled out their traffic controllers first. As fiber becomes available, RuggedCom switches are being installed into the traffic cabinets, and controllers are being brought on-line via Ethernet. While only partially implemented so far, the roll-out has been a success. Beyond enabling real-time control of traffic signals, choosing RuggedCom had an unanticipated benefit. After a rash of severe electrical storms in the area, Palm Beach County reported at least two instances where traffic cabinets had been struck by lightning and that the only cabinet devices not destroyed by the strikes were the RuggedSwitches. Now that's rugged!
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