Distributed Data Delivery in Partially Connected Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are expected to be widely
used in communication and control systems in the future. Some
applications introduce only partially connected sensor networks
leading to lower reliability or availability of the measured data.
The objective of this project is to develop and analyze a data
distribution method which can increase the system reliability
and keep the memory consumption low on each device.
A Reed-Solomon coding scheme is applied as a solution where
a certain number of unavailable devices can be tolerated without
jeopardizing the system reliability. A probabilistic system model
is derived to describe the distribution and reconstruction of a
message from a sensor to the gateway. This model is verified
and visualized by means of a simulation implemented in Java.
A prototype of a system containing two data devices and one
redundant device is implemented to test the model in a real
life scenario. Performance evaluation shows that the probability
to receive all sensor measurements by using the proposed
cooperative data distribution method is higher compared with
the non-cooperative case.