Benchmarking the Robustness of Cellular Up-Links in Automatic Weather Station Networks
Open Access
- 1 January 2018
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Scientific Research Publishing, Inc. in Communications and Network
- Vol. 10 (03), 78-92
- https://doi.org/10.4236/cn.2018.103007
Abstract
We present a problem for benchmarking the robustness of cellular up-links, in an automatic weather station (AWS) testbed. Based on the problem, we conduct a small-scale measurement study of robustness, where the AWS is equipped with four (4) cellular modems for weather data delivery. The effectiveness of up-links is challenging because of overlapping spatial-temporal factors such as the presence of good reflectors that lead to multi-path effects, interference, network load or other reasons. We argue that, there is a strong need for independent assessments of their robustness, to perform end-to-end network measurement. However, it is yet difficult to go from a particular measurement to an assessment of the entire network. We extensively measure the variability of Radio Signal Strength (RSSI) as link metric on the cellular modems. The RSSI is one of the important link metrics that can determine the robustness of received RF signals, and explore how they differed from one another at a particular location and instant time. We also apply the statistical analysis that quantifies the level of stability by considering the robustness, referring short-term variation, and determines good up-link in comparison to weak one. The results show that the robustness of cellular up-links exists for an unpredictable period of time and lower than one could hope. More than 50% of up-links are intermittent. Therefore, we plan to extend our work by exploring RSSI thresholds, to develop a classification scheme supporting a decision whether a link is either intermittent or not. This will help in normalizing the level of stability, to design the RSSI estimation metric for the robust routing protocol in weather data networks.Keywords
This publication has 14 references indexed in Scilit:
- Robust assessment of changes in cellular networksPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2013
- SNOWWEB - Wirelessly connected weather stations in AntarcticaPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2013
- SmartConnect: A system for the design and deployment of wireless sensor networksPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2013
- Spatio-temporal characteristics of link quality in wireless sensor networksPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2012
- Evaluating Temporal Robustness of Mobile NetworksIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2011
- Energy–Robustness Tradeoff in Cellular Network Power ControlIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 2008
- SensorScope: Out-of-the-Box Environmental MonitoringPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2008
- An adaptive communication architecture for wireless sensor networksPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2007
- Design and Deployment of a Remote Robust Sensor Network: Experiences from an Outdoor Water Quality Monitoring NetworkPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2007
- Taming the underlying challenges of reliable multihop routing in sensor networksPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2003