Two-Layer Optimized Railway Monitoring System Using Wi-Fi and ZigBee Interfaced Wireless Sensor Network

In this paper, a two-layer optimized railway monitoring system using Wi-Fi and ZigBee interfaced wireless sensor network (WSN) has been proposed for optimized bandwidth and power requirements. In the proposed network, a two-layer structure, i.e., wireless local area network (WLAN) and wireless personal area network (WPAN) of WSN is implemented and analyzed. The two-layer structure is implemented to reduce the unbalance load on gateway sensor node and intermediate wireless sensor nodes. In the first layer of the proposed architecture, WPAN is designed using ZigBee due to its low-power consumption and the second layer WLAN is designed using Wi-Fi due to high data rate. The proposed architecture has provided reduced power that is less than the half of the purely Wi-Fi based network still maintaining the bandwidth requirements.