Highly Reliable Decision-Making Using Reliability Factor Feedback for Factory Condition Monitoring via WSNs

Abstract

Cooperation among sensors in a wireless sensor network, deployed for industrial monitoring in an indoor scenario, is a topic of interest in the smart factory and smart city research. The indoor wireless communication channel is very harsh and the observations of all the sensors cannot be sent reliably to the base station. Failure to transmit correct sensing results to the base station may result in false alarms or missed detection of events. Therefore, we propose a cooperation scheme for the wireless sensors to send the data reliably to the base station. Our aim is to increase the reliability of the received information, reduce the probability of error, lower the overall power consumption, and keep the latency to an acceptable low level. We propose a reliability factor feedback algorithm to adjust the weight of unreliable sensors in the decision-making process. The proposed scheme is analyzed based on its latency, power consumption, and packet delivery ratio. Our results show significant improvement in the reliability of the received data, improved packet delivery, and reduced false alarm ratio for full repetition and cluster head-based cooperation. The power consumption and latency in data transmission are also kept to an acceptable low level.