Sensor network architecture for intelligent high-speed train on-board monitoring

The China's high-speed railway is experiencing a rapid growth. Its operating mileage and the number of operating trains will exceed 45 000 km and 1500 trains by 2015, respectively. During the long range and constant high-speed operation, the high-speed trains have extremely complex and varied work conditions. Such a situation creates a huge demand for high-speed train on-board monitoring. In this paper, architecture for high-speed train on-board monitoring sensor network is proposed. This architecture is designed to achieve the goals of reliable sensing, scalable data transporting, and easy management. The three design goals are realized separately. The reliable sensing is achieved by deploying redundant sensor nodes in the same components. Then a hierarchal transporting scheme is involved to meet the second goal. Finally, an electronic-tag based addressing method is introduced to solve the management problem.