Network dynamics analysis and benchmarking on an outdoor heterogeneous wireless sensor network

Abstract

We present an empirical study on network dynamics in an outdoor heterogeneous multi-hop WSN deployment for long-term environmental monitoring. We analyze the network dynamics in three aspects, the link level characteristics, the routing level characteristics, and the overall temporal characteristics. Our analysis provides insights including: (1) asymmetric links are the majority in heterogeneous networks which are mainly caused by the hardware heterogeneity; and (2) routing protocol plays an essential role in generating routing dynamics in addition to wireless link dynamics. We also create/compose benchmark profiles based on the observations of network testbed dynamics obtained during a long-term operation. The benchmark profiles include the link information between heterogeneous hardware platforms and the complete routing topological information.