Smart wireless railway monitoring system

With the increased demand for railway services, train speed and density are consistently increasing in the last two decades. As a result, more strict safety requirements for railway signaling, control and infrastructure are needed. Accompanying that trend, in recent years, wireless communication techniques have also advanced rapidly. Especially with smart low cost wireless communication techniques like WIFI, Bluetooth, and ZigBee going into maturity, thus making it possible to develop a wireless system to monitor a railway´s signaling or control or infrastructure condition. An effective low cost monitor system will help the normal function of railway systems. This paper gives a description of the development of one such monitoring system. The whole system consists of a remote controller and many monitor units. The remote controller gets data from the monitor units and sends control commands and monitoring control information to the monitor units. The paper will show how such a basic set up could be deployed for railway monitoring using wireless technology.