A Cooperative Wireless Sensor Network for Indoor Industrial Monitoring

Abstract

Industrial wireless sensor networks are getting popular for indoor monitoring of heavy machinery and large factories to make a reliable decision on the state of machines in a certain area of interest. However, the indoor wireless communication channel is not always reliable, and observations of some sensors cannot be reported successfully to the base station. In order to deal with this problem, we propose a cooperative WSN scheme by introducing a novel cooperation mechanism and a medium access control protocol. The proposed scheme effectively increases the probability of correct decision about the state of the machine, reduces the probability of false alarms at a given signal level, and reduces the overall energy consumption as compared to noncooperative schemes. We also present a closed-form expression for the symbol-error rate analysis of the proposed scheme, which shows that our proposed scheme achieves full diversity order offered by the cooperation scheme.