Performance Analysis of Duty-Cycling Wireless Sensor Network for Train Localization

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) offer promising solutions for real-time object monitoring and tracking. An interesting application is train localization, in which anchor sensors are deployed along the railway track to detect the train and timely report to a gateway installed on the train. To save energy, anchor sensors operate based on an asynchronous duty-cycling protocol. The accuracy of train localization highly depends on the availability of anchor sensors when a train pass by them, which in turn depends on the duty-cycling. This paper presents an analysis of energy consumption with different levels of performance compromises. We evaluate the energy consumption through simulations, and results show that with slight performance compromise on the number of active anchors, the lifetime of anchor sensors can be significantly extended.