Analysis Of Data Forwarding Issues In Wireless Networks Aimed For Railway Signaling Systems

Due to the difficulties faced with wire-based signaling systems, wireless communication based signaling systems are gaining importance worldwide. While the cellular communication based systems like GSM-R and LTE-R were proposed in majority of the cases, the non-cellular communication systems that are based on adhoc networks and wireless sensor networks have also become equally important. In this later case, routing protocols like AODV are needed to forward the data packets when destination is not reachable directly from the source. In this context, if some improvements are made to these protocols to make it more suitable to these environments, it can help to have better performance. These aspects are studied and analyzed in this work by carrying out the simulation studies for the model network considered for railway signaling application. Results suggest that making use of GPS and keeping the alternate route on hand can improve the performance considerably. Omnet++ simulator with INET framework is used to carry out the simulations.