Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks in the perspective of diversity and spectral efficiency

Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSN) are a type of sensor network especially adapted and designed for the industrial environment to improve process and efficiencies. They inherit the potential to significantly outperform the traditional wired industrial monitoring and control systems, both in terms of cost and efficiency. The broadcast nature of the wireless channel, on one hand, can be exploited to enhance system diversity by processing multiple copies of the same signal; while on the other hand, it results into an interference limited system, degrading the system performance. This paper proposes two configurations for IWSN, where the first configuration strives to enhance the reliability of the system while the second aspires to enhance the spectral efficiency. This paper resorts to two metrics, i.e., bit error rate (BER) and outage probability for the performance analysis of the proposed configurations.