Application communication reliability of wireless sensor networks

This paper considers application communication reliability (ACR) of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) supporting K-coverage in the presence of shadowing for a specific monitored area. Application communication relates to the acquisition of sensed data from a specific area and network connectivity that concerns the reliable delivery of the observed data from sensor nodes to the sink node. The analytical evaluation of ACR involves two steps: first identifying all the K-coverage sets, and then evaluating the communication reliability of delivering the observed data from sensor nodes within the identified K-coverage sets to the sink node. Two single-path routing algorithms, shortest-path distance algorithm and shortest-path hop algorithm, are considered for evaluating the communication reliability during the second step. Their performances in terms of ACR and energy consumptions are compared through an empirical analysis of several examples. Results show that WSNs using the shortest-path distance algorithm are more reliable than those using the shortest-path hop algorithm in most cases, but consume more energy for delivering the sensed data to the sink node. Different scenarios are also considered to evaluate the impact of node density, channel condition and different monitored areas on ACR of WSNs.