Low-Latency and High-Reliability Cooperative WSN for Indoor Industrial Monitoring

Abstract

Sensor networks have been widely used traditionally in monitoring the state of heavy machinery and large factories whose condition is critical to the operation of machine as well as the safety of people around them. Recently, industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs) are getting popular for environment monitoring in such conditions to help us make a decision on the state of machines in a certain area of interest. However, the wireless communication channels, which these sensors must operate in, are 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 dual-hop cooperative WSN scheme, which uses in-network data aggregation mechanism in order to reduce the overall latency as well as improve the reliability of the received information. We also devise a protocol for the organization and operation of the proposed sensor network. The proposed scheme effectively increases the probability of correct decision about the state of the machines, and reduces the probability of false alarms at a given signal level.