Wireless Sensor Network Group Connectivity

The importance of monitoring physical and environmental conditions increases day by day and, therefore, so is the necessity of having a reliable wireless sensor network (WSN). The need to overcome challenges in WSN deployment and operation arises due to WSN's nature and characteristics such as possible nodes' mobility, limited radio and processing power, available storage and physical effects of the environment (particularly harsh environments) and balancing energy consumption has motivated us to investigate solutions to those problems. By studying related work, it was possible to observe that techniques such as the use of a good link estimator and the deployment of a suitable topology are essential features for a WSN. The core idea is to capture link connectivity dynamically and use it on routing decisions to gain reliability and estimate the whole network connectivity. The three main steps for deployment of a reliable WSN are the following: - Link estimator - Routing and neighbor information - Suitable routing algorithms In addition, self-organization is an important capability that WSNs need to present. They should be reliable, scalable and energy efficient during the network lifetime and self-organization plays a key role in this context. Summing up all these aspects, it comes to the point that reliable connectivity is an important characteristic of a WSN. The goal of this work is to contribute with the research in the subject by means of implementing a suitable topology management and evaluating the network connectivity by the means of quantitative metric for the network as whole. Practical experiments results are presented and discussed