Signal propagation on a railway wireless condition monitoring system

Modern railway systems are based on sophisticated condition monitoring for predictive maintenance, safety system, traffic management and other applications. The data acquisition system can be wired or wireless system. With the aim of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) we are able to reduce installation, recovery, fault diagnosing costs and times. There are lots of papers and books related to WSN, but still there is gap reliability between these researches and industrial applications. The main problem with WSN is sensitivity to environment. During train movement because of changing in surrounding environment, for example the trains pass embankments, trees, tunnels, station platforms, etc. which have a random behaviour on WSN. Most of the researches rely on the simulation results instead of practical test, and because of the variety of environment, the results can be different in compare of practical tests. To quantify the reliability of WSN in railway, we have characterised wireless channel reliability on moving train, in different environments and geographic locations.