Measurement-based analysis of cooperative relaying in an industrial wireless sensor network

Cooperative relaying is a communication technique that has been shown to improve link reliability between communicating entities. Most results in this area are obtained either analytically or via simulations. Rather few real-world experiments are conducted to backup theoretical results. This paper intends to go a step in this direction of applied research. We study the performance of cooperative relaying for industrial applications based on real-world measurements. These link-level measurements are conducted employing low-cost, off-the-shelf IEEE 802.15.4 devices in a factory characterized by a harsh and cluttered environment. Using the measured data, we emulate a simple cooperative relaying protocol to investigate the performance in terms of outage and packet delivery ratio and study parameters suitable for relay selection.