End-to-End Data Delivery Reliability Model for Estimating and Optimizing the Link Quality of Industrial WSNs

With the success of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), traditional engineering and infrastructure industries are starting to develop solutions using WSN technologies. One of the main challenges of designing and developing WSNs for industrial monitoring and control is satisfying their strict reliability requirements. In this paper, we present a network-level reliability model, namely, end-to-end data delivery reliability (E2E-DDR), for estimating and optimizing the reliability performance of WSNs. In the E2E-DDR model, a framework is presented for capturing the mapping function between the packet reception ratio, background noise, and received signal strength (RSS). We use an alpha-stable distribution to accurately represent the background noise and a modified log-normal path loss model to more realistically describe the RSS. We also report a comprehensive performance evaluation performed by applying the E2E-DDR model in a real-world case study to estimate the network-level reliability and optimize the WSN deployment parameters.