Topology analysis based on linear wireless sensor networks in monitoring of high-speed railways

Abstract

Nowadays, the application of wireless sensor networks in monitoring of high-speed railways is rare or immature in China. In this paper, a deployment strategy of nodes along the railway is proposed for minimizing the total energy consumption. As high-speed trains have high requirements on the real-time and reliability of monitoring networks, the real-time, robustness and lifetime of networks are analyzed for two kinds of topologies which are based on minimum and maximum distance transmission in linear wireless sensor networks (LWSNs). Especially, a group-based data transmission mechanism is proposed for the topology of maximum distance transmission, which aims to improve the performances of real-time and robustness. Results of theoretical analysis and simulations show that the proposed mechanism brings better performances of real-time and robustness for the topology based on maximum distance transmission. In addition, the network lifetime of the topology based on maximum distance transmission has an obvious advantage compared with the topology of minimum distance transmission when the spacing between two adjacent nodes is less than a certain value.