Performance Analysis of the Event-Reliability Approach for a Lattice Wireless Sensor Network with Radio Irregularities

It has been recognised that spatial redundancy in wireless sensor networks can be exploited in order to simplify the transport of sensed data. The resulting transport technique is in fact a simple packet repetition scheme, where the packet rate is a tunable parameter. In this work, we analyze a simple squared lattice network. However, in contrast to other works on the subject, we allow pathloss randomnesses to be present in the service environment of the network. With these settings in hand, 1) we compare the perceived packet delivery rate at the sink node for two reactive routing protocols and 2) we study the dependence of this metric on the scaling factor of the network size. Simulation results show that the shadowing phenomena, by destroying the regularity of the network, degrades the performance of the event-detection. This fact directly impacts on the detection time of the monitored event