Wireless Sensor Networks Performance Measurements and Monitoring

Although the special characteristics of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) help in reducing the cost of sensor nodes manufacturing and deployment, they added new challenges that directly affect the network functionality. This is increases the probability of network functionality deviation from its norm operation and affects its' collected data accuracy. Moreover, these challenges reduce the network lifetime. To insure the stability of WSN functionality at acceptable level during its operation, this paper proposes a new performance-monitoring algorithm. The proposed algorithm tracks network operation and isolate deviated network nodes before they have a high impact on network collected data accuracy or network lifetime. The purposed algorithm functionality was tested on a Berkeley (Crossbow) Mica2 sensor Motes testbed with the TinyOS `Surge' multihop application. The experiment results show that the algorithm achieved a high-level of detection reliability with resilience to both high packet loss and environmental changes.