Comparison Between Reactive and Proactive Protocols of Wireless Sensor Networks: Railway Application

Railway is a critical application; hence, all systems that compose the railway infrastructure must meet two conditions: availability and safety. The availability ensures continuous operation of the system; on the other hand, safety is achieved when the device works properly regardless of the environmental or operating conditions. In addition, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are used to perform tasks previously performed manually. However, it is necessary to analyse what protocol is appropriate for the railway industry, since availability and safety are the required attributes. In this work, a recently proposed routing protocol, the Multi-Parent Hierarchical (MPH), has been compared with a well-known protocol, the Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV), in order to find the most suitable one for the railway applications. For this purpose, a simulator has been developed, which faithfully reifies the workings of a given protocol, considering a fixed, reconfigurable ad-hoc network given by the number and location of participants, and general network conditions.</p

ETCS On-board Unit Safety Testing: Saboteurs, Testing Strategy and Results

It is necessary to verify the faults tolerance of the European Train Control System (ETCS) on-board unit even if these faults are uncommon. Traditional test methods defined and used in ETCS do not allow to check this, so it is necessary to develop a new mechanism of tests. This paper presents the design and implementation of a saboteur applied to the railway sector. The main purpose of the saboteur is the fault injection in the communication interfaces. By means of a virtual laboratory it is possible to simulate actual train journeys to test the ETCS on-board unit. Making use of the saboteurs and the virtual laboratory it is possible to analyse the behaviour of the train in the presence of unexpected faults, and to verify that the decisions taken are correct to ensure the required safety level. Therefore, this work shows a testing strategy based on different kinds of train journeys when faults are injected, and the analysis of the results.</p