An Experimental Study Towards Understanding Data Delivery Performance Over a WSN Link

TL;DR

This study provides an extensive experimental analysis of how various parameter configurations jointly affect wireless sensor network link performance under different conditions, offering practical guidelines and empirical models.

Contribution

It is the first comprehensive experimental investigation considering multiple parameters jointly affecting WSN link performance with large-scale data analysis.

Findings

Joint parameter effects significantly influence performance metrics.

Empirical models explain the impacts of parameters on link quality.

Practical guidelines for optimal parameter configurations are proposed.

Abstract

The performance of a wireless sensor network (WSN) depends fundamentally on how its various parameters are configured under different link quality conditions. Surprisingly, even though WSNs have been extensively researched, there still lacks an in-depth understanding on how parameter configurations affect, in particular jointly, the performance under different link quality conditions. To fill the gap, this paper presents an extensive experimental study on the performance of a wireless sensor network link, where measurement data of more than 200 million packets were collected. Different from existing work, we consider major parameters from different layers together and measure their joint effects on key performance metrics under an extensive set of parameter configurations. Based on the large amount of measurement data, we investigate the impacts of these parameters and their joint configurations on the performance, introduce empirical models to theoretically reason the impacts, discuss implications of the obtained results, and suggest practical guidelines for parameter configurations. Through these, a comprehensive overview of parameter configuration impacts on the erformance is provided, which provides new insights on wireless link performance in WSNs.