On the Connectivity of Highly Dynamic Wireless Sensor Networks in Smart Factory

With the development of smart manufacturing in Industry 4.0, large amount of heterogeneous data are generated from multiple sources. Various data processing techniques can be applied to these data for the purpose of extracting potential information about the status of the manufacturing network. Thus, data are valuable to the analysis and adjustment of the manufacturing processes. Due to the diversity of products, assembly lines and manufacturing processes are highly dynamic. In view of the flexible deployment of wireless sensor networks, they have been widely deployed to conduct data collection. However, due to the limited radio range of a wireless sensor node, the connectivity of a highly dynamic wireless sensor network is a key issue. In this paper, we analyzed the connectivity in a wireless sensor network and accorded three types of connectivity. Then, we developed two network connectivity models from the perspective of one dimension and two dimensions. The degrees of connectivity for both two nodes and the network are elaborated. Finally, the relation between the number of sink nodes and the average degree of connectivity of the network is analyzed based on experimental results.