A Study on the Reliability/Safety assessment and improvement of USN Gateway for Train Control

The recent development of USN (Ubiquitous Sensor Network) technology has broadened its applications to many fields of industry. The USN technology enables the system to monitor and control the status of distributed sensor nodes based on the low-powered communications. Applying the USN in the train control domain, the operational efficiency can be enhanced, where the reliability and the safety of the system are the key challenges. This paper suggests the system design for evaluating and improving the reliability and safety of the gateway, which is a USN component that manages the radio network among the sensors and collects the information from them. For this purpose, the reliability and the level of safety integrity of a general gateway have been predicted quantitatively and the supplementary design has been proposed for the selected week points. The verification on the reliability and the safety of the improved gateway according to the related standards has been followed. With the results of the study, the applicability of USN gateway for train control systems has been reviewed.