Application Communication Reliability of Wireless Sensor Networks Supporting K-coverage

Application communication in wireless sensor networks (WSN) depends on two important factors: acquisition of sensed data from a specific area, and network connectivity that concerns the reliable delivery of the observed data from sensor nodes to the sink node. In this paper, we consider the application communication reliability (ACR) of WSN supporting K-coverage in the presence of shadowing for a specific monitored area. The analytical evaluation of ACR involves two steps. We first identify all the K-coverage sets. Then, we evaluate the communication reliability of delivering the observed data from sensor nodes within the identified K-coverage sets to the sink node. Two single-path routing algorithms, shortest-path distance algorithm and shortest-path hop algorithm, are considered for evaluating the communication reliability during the second step; their performances in terms of ACR and energy consumptions are compared through an empirical analysis of several examples. Different scenarios are considered to evaluate the impact of node density, channel condition and different monitored areas on ACR. Simulation and analytical results show that WSN using the shortest-path distance algorithm is more reliable than that using the shortest-path hop algorithm in most cases, but WSN using the shortest-path hop algorithm consumes less energy for delivering the sensed data to the sink node.