Impacts of radio irregularity on duty-cycled industrial wireless sensor networks

With rapid adoption of advanced wireless sensors in last decades, industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs) are increasingly deployed in the industries for various applications. Sleep scheduling is a common approach in IWSNs to overcome network lifetime problem due to energy-constrained sensor nodes. However, in real-environment, node’s transmit power varies in different directions due to non-isotropic nature of electromagnetic transmission, path-loss, noise, and temperature. Thus, radio irregularity results in link asymmetry, thereafter, affects the performance of sleep scheduling in IWSNs. In this paper, we evaluate the impacts of radio irregularity on sleeping probability and lifetime performances of well-known connected k-neighborhood (CKN)-based sleep scheduling algorithms in duty-cycled IWSNs. We derive the upper-limit of sleep probability with radio irregularity variables. From the extensive simulations, we show that radio irregularity increases the number of awake nodes in duty-cycled sensor networks, therefore, network lifetime decreases with increasing values of link asymmetry parameters. Finally, an adverse impact of radio irregularity is observed in higher k-value in CKN-based algorithm due to more awake nodes to satisfy the k-connectivity in presence of link asymmetry.