Study of a dual radio sensor platform for effective on-board real-time monitoring of freight trains
Sushanta Mohan Rakshit, Michael Hempel, Hamid Sharif · 2016
The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) has proliferated the use of connected sensors to observe and control the world around us. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are becoming ubiquitous tools that monitor their surroundings and also oftentimes provide actuation to affect the state of their environment. One of the key application domains for real-time monitoring and control is the freight railroad sector in North America. North America's freight railroad industry is responsible for transporting nearly 40% of goods, making it an inseparable aspect of national economic well-being. The current stationary wayside methodology of monitoring freight trains and the goods they transport is not effective and cannot provide the breadth of capabilities required to ensure safe and efficient operations. The use of otherwise popular existing communication technologies like ZigBee for this scenario were found to perform insufficiently due to the unique network topology imposed by the freight train. The Hybrid Technology Networking (HTN) protocol has been proposed to alleviate these issues. In this work a custom hardware platform is presented to optimally implement and deploy networks of sensors using the HTN protocol. A model for predicting network performance metrics using this platform along with performance test results are presented.