A Unified Framework for Software Defined Sensing, Transmission and Computing

The in-cessation trend of railways ramification calls for railway sensing on an urgent basis. Railway sense is required to keep suspecting potential danger in a large scope and provide a safe transportation environment. The fundamental infrastructure to realize railway sensing comprises of space and terrestrial integrated network (STIN) nodes, such as high-speed railway, trackside equipment, unmanned aerial vehicle, airship, and remote sensing satellite. This architecture needs to support diverse applications flexibly and ensure efficient infrastructure management. Inspired by the philosophy of software-defined network, which attempts to give more flexibility to networks, we propose a software-defined sensing and integrated architecture for such a network. We decouple the railway sensing application from the physical infrastructure. Besides, we designed centralized controllers to manage physical facilities and supply APIs of data processing, including acquisition, transmission, computation, and storage. Various applications can share common infrastructure with such properties, and each of these applications can customize its data acquisition, transmission, and computing by requesting APIs of controllers. This paper includes discussions of the design details of the proposed architecture and benefits. We also proposed some open problems and the potential solutions to solve them, which we hope to provide railway sensing research in a new direction.