Research And Application Of Wireless Sensor Network Synchronization Technology For Railway Transport Of Dangerous Goods

Safety is the eternal theme of the railway transport. Railway is one of the main ways for dangerous goods transportation. The lack of effective monitoring for goods status in transiting will leads to negligence of accident, which could be a great threat of train safety as well as people’s life and property. The Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) combines sensing technology, wireless technology and distributed computing technology. Its cheapness, high-precision, real-time and easy-deployment gives it broad prospects of development on railway dangerous goods transportation.The time synchronization is of great importance for ensuring the smooth working of a distributed WSN, reducing its energy consumption, as well as extending its working time. Hence it is always one of the focuses of WSN researching.The focus of this study is to design a simple and efficient time synchronization mechanism for railway dangerous goods transportation WSN system. According to the classic time synchronization algorithm analysis and the application system requirements on the accuracy of time synchronization, the paper presents the thinking of a time synchronization based on application layer. According to this idea, the paper designed a lightweight time synchronization algorithm based on application layer. The algorithm uses the strategies of accurate scheduling to avoid signal collision, and obtains a higher accuracy of time synchronization. This algorithm also takes advantage of the broadcast nature of the wireless medium, to improve the energy efficiency and the convergence speed.Finally, this paper gives the modeling and simulation of this algorithm on OMNeT++, and the outcome confirms that this mechanism can achieve expected result. Under the premise of accuracy, this mechanism reduces system complexity, increases energy efficiency, and fully meets the application requirements.