A Wireless Remote Monitoring System: Application in the Northeast Corridor Railtrack

This paper describes the development and deployment of a modular, remote wireless sensor monitoring system and its initial deployment for monitoring railway track performance on a busy high speed Amtrak Northeast Corridor line. The monitoring platform addresses some of the challenges faced by remote system applications; cost factor, power consumption, remote data transfer, storage and processing, and modularity. The remote sensor network consists of a) on-site sensor mesh, b) on-site base station, and c) data server in the headquarters. The on-site sensor mesh consists of sensors (e.g. strain gages, temperature) interfaced to motes. Data from the sensor mesh are conveyed to the base station and to the data server near real time at MIT via GPRS wireless Internet connection. The collected data are automatically stored in a database and can be accessed by any user equipped with an Internet browser and password. This paper includes results from this on-going deployment and provides an update on the capabilities of wireless sensor networks for long term and near real-time monitoring.