As China’s transportation infrastructure continues to expand—with expressways, intercity railways, and urban rail networks advancing rapidly—tunnel engineering has become a critical component of the modern transport system. In response to growing demands for intelligent and safe operations, communication systems are evolving beyond traditional single-function roles toward multi-system integration, intelligent collaboration, and enhanced network resilience.

Wintop Optical Optoelectronics focuses on industrial communication technology innovation, providing highly reliable, highly integrated, and highly adaptable industrial switch solutions for complex scenarios such as highway tunnels, fully empowering the safe and efficient operation of smart transportation systems.

A new expressway project in Western China passes through multiple mountain tunnels, including one key control section more than 4.2 km in length. To improve operational safety and emergency response, the project owner planned a high-reliability, remotely managed emergency communication network supporting six subsystems: video surveillance, IP broadcasting, emergency telephony, fire alarms, environmental sensing, and automated control.

01.Inside the tunnel, multiple front-end devices are installed every 100 meters. The dense layout requires simultaneous, stable, and low-latency network access, placing exceptionally high demands on switch port density, forwarding performance, and operational stability—conditions that traditional products cannot fully meet.

02.Tunnel power and communication enclosures are compact, leaving little room for large rack-mount equipment. Many conventional devices are bulky, generate excessive heat, offer limited installation options, and have poorly positioned ports, calling for an industrial-grade compact deployment solution.

03.The tunnel’s harsh environment presents extreme challenges: high humidity, dust, wide temperature fluctuations, lightning surges, and frequent electromagnetic interference.

04.Commercial-grade network equipment cannot maintain stable, long-term operation under such conditions. High failure rates increase maintenance costs and compromise reliability. Industrial switches with wide-temperature tolerance, surge protection, electromagnetic immunity, and high IP protection ratings are essential to guarantee 24/7 stability.

05.The network must offer rapid self-healing to avoid single-point failures. Tunnel communications carry safety-critical services; if a primary link is interrupted, alarms, broadcasting, and video feedback could fail simultaneously, delaying emergency response and creating serious hazards.

Every 200 meters, a Wintop Optical RS636-2GF4GT-4POE industrial PoE switch provides power and data to cameras and sensors, simplifying cabling. Armored shielded network cables connect emergency telephones and broadcast speakers, while armored optical fiber uplinks carry data to the aggregation layer, ensuring stable long-distance transmission.

Data from the access layer is consolidated by the “regional hub,” the Wintop Optical RS6316-8GF8GT industrial switch. Equipped with eight gigabit fiber ports and a fiber-ring architecture, a single unit can aggregate four independent fiber rings. Its high-throughput design guarantees smooth forwarding of HD video, sensor data, and broadcast audio. Physical isolation between information and video networks prevents service interference, while industrial ring-network protocols enable millisecond-level recovery from link failures.

Two Wintop Optical CM5728-4WF8GC16GT industrial core switches form a dual-link backup structure to ensure high availability. They interconnect with monitoring hosts, data servers, and emergency telephone management systems, managing multiple service domains and coordinating data flows for video monitoring, emergency communications, and environmental sensing. The redundant network supports multiple protocols for seamless interoperability across different vendors and subsystems.

Across the entire tunnel, the Wintop Optical industrial network solution delivers unified access and stable transmission for video surveillance, alarms, broadcasting, environmental monitoring, and more. Confronted with dense device deployment, stringent reliability requirements, and a harsh operating environment, Wintop Optical provides not only industrial-grade switches but a complete integrated industrial networking solution.

In today’s era of smart transportation and intelligent infrastructure, tunnel communication systems serve as a true “lifeline,” enabling safety linkage, emergency response, and operational dispatch. Wintop Optical Optoelectronics upholds its brand philosophy of Professionalism, Pragmatism, Innovation, and Excellence, continuously refining products and optimizing solutions to provide customers with well-structured, stable, and easily integrated industrial network systems.