Transmission performance analysis of wireless sensor networks under complex railway environment

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be widely applied to the environmental monitoring and control systems in railway transportation industry. In this paper, an analytical framework is proposed to study the transmission performance of one-dimensional WSNs under complex railway environment. Specifically, the WSNs along the railway are comprised by two types of sensor nodes: the ordinary sensors and the powerful ones, of which the distributions both follow Poisson Point Process. Analytical results are obtained for the successful reception probabilities of both single-hop communication and end-to-end transmission under the composite channel model, which is the superposition of large-scale fading and Nakagami fading channel. To be specific, we also derive the closed-form expression of successful reception probability in condition of the free space propagation with the path loss exponent α = 2. A simulation platform is established to evaluate the impact of different factors on the transmission performance, and the analysis results are validated to be consistent with the simulations. The results in this paper can be applied to evaluate the transmission performance of WSNs and provide useful guidance for the network design under the railway scenarios.