Design & Analysis of Wireless Network for Signaling and Safety in Railways

Abstract

Today’s world still follows the wired network in railways for signalling and control with least options for safety. But with the advent of new high speed mass transit system, deployment of a secure and highly fast signalling mechanism has become the need of the hour. Indian Railways is looking forward to start high speed bullet trains on trial basis. So, to present a novel solution for the system, this paper aims to design and analyse a wireless network, adapted from Railways’ network structure, which aims to have high throughput, less delay as various key features using ns2 (Network Simulator) software. For the best deployment of such wireless networks, we have introduced the concept of “ZONE FORMATION”. A concept of Modified MAC (M-MAC) over IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol has been proposed. M-MAC protocol with some reduction in frame over-head size, reduction in Contention Window size and a new Adaptive Back-off Timer help us to achieve necessary results. The designed network has a Hybrid topology with star topology and bus topology joined together using Term nodes. The results have been analysed using standard channel and Rayleigh fading channel after necessary modifications to get the results, and then later analysed the same with real data collected from survey in Delhi Metro Rail Corporation Ltd., New Delhi.