Evaluation of a Link Quality Estimator in an Outdoor WSN Using a Dedicated Node
Emerson Brasil Gomes, Ruan D. Gomes, Iguatemi Eduardo da Fonseca · 2019
Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSN) demand deterministic and reliable communication. Adaptive mechanisms, such as channel adaptation and channel hopping, can be applied to deal with the temporal and spatial variations in link quality that can appear in an IWSN. The first step to effectively use such mechanisms is to estimate the quality of the links in the network, which can provide useful information for the adaptive mechanisms, in order to improve important metrics, such as the packet reception rate, and energy consumption. In this context, this paper evaluates experimentally a link quality estimator, which uses dedicated nodes to estimate the link quality in real-time, without imposing a high overhead. A long-term experiment was performed in a fuel loading plant and the results showed that the estimator is accurate and reactive for the scenario considered in the paper. From the results obtained in the experiment, it was also possible to observe the quality of the 16 channels defined by the IEEE 802.15.4 standard in the 2.4 GHz band, for different nodes, and discuss how the adaptive mechanisms could be used to increase the network quality of service, by picking the appropriate channels for each link during the network operation.