A Study of Network Stability on Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In association with recent advancement in wireless communications as well as penetration of wireless devices with sensing, computation and wireless communication capabilities, the wireless sensor networks have become an important research area due to their potential for providing cheap and flexible solutions to data monitoring and device actuation. And, many studies have analyzed routing effectiveness for wireless multi-hop networks and/or mobile ad-hoc networks under conditions that continuous communication and point-to-point traffic flows between nodes inside the network are assumed. On the other hand, our targeted WSNs for data monitoring have some different assumptions such as traffic patterns on data monitoring, restrictive packet existing periods, and network consisting sensor nodes with constrained capabilities. For evaluation of network stability, not only average loss rates are important, but also distributions are relevant, because high loss rates on temporal wireless links would make impossible to ensure reliable management of the targeted application. So, in order to evaluate stability of those networks, novel evaluation metrics are required. In this paper, we address stability of the WSN for data monitoring, propose a mechanism to improve the equitableness of the routes to the central node as the advanced local route reeselection procedure, and evaluate the proposed mechanism by a conditional data delivery ratio with wireless failure.