Area Coverage Reliability Evaluation for Collaborative Intelligence and Meta-Computing of Decentralized Industrial Internet of Things

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is evolving toward decentralization and autonomous operation. Nodes in decentralized IIoT collaboratively sense data and communicate to participate in meta-computing and provide diverse intelligent services. Area coverage reliability evaluates the information collaborative intelligence sensing and communication capabilities of nodes in decentralized IIoT for a target area. It serves as a crucial performance evaluation metric for the meta-computing and intelligent services of decentralized IIoT. Existing area coverage reliability evaluation algorithms do not consider the dynamic node states in decentralized IIoT, and overlook the capability of nodes to collaborate in meta-computing. To address these issues, this article proposes a novel confident information coverage (CIC)-based area coverage reliability metric (CACREL), which comprehensively considers node multistate, node collaboration, network coverage rate, and network connectivity. To effectively evaluate CACREL, a CIC-based coverage reliability evaluation algorithm (CACR) is proposed. Specifically, CACR transforms complex networks into grid networks and utilizes a coverage table (CT) to describe different coverage states of each grid, which reduces the complexity of the area coverage reliability evaluation. Additionally, CACR employs a reliable path algorithm to converge the CT of each grid to the sink node based on grid connectivity. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed CACR can accurately evaluate the area coverage reliability of decentralized IIoT and enhance its service performance.