AN APPROACH TO IMPROVE RELIABILITY IN WSAN

Wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) are the bridge between the cyber and physical worlds. WSANs collect information about the state of physical world and transmit sensed data to interested users. WSANs can be used in many applications such as health care, home automation, assisted living, intelligent building, intelligent transportation, disaster relief, planet exploration, and industrial control etc. There are many research challenges for coordination and communication in WSANs. In many applications, however, it is not sufficient to just observe the state of the physical system; it is also expected to respond to the sensed events/data by performing corresponding actions upon the physical system. The defining feature of an NCS is that control and feedback signals are exchanged among the system’s components in the form of information packages through a network. QoS in WSANs can be characterized by reliability, timeliness, robustness, availability, and security, among others. In WSAN, due to many factors, packet loss is difficult to avoid completely so it is essential to know the characteristics of wireless channels used by WSANs. The focus of this project is on addressing the problem of network reliability. Specifically, the behavior of wireless channels is analyzed based on a realistic link layer model. Packet loss rate (PLR) is taken as a major metric for the analysis and solution that can take advantage of existing prediction algorithms i