EMPIRICAL ROBUSTNESS ANALYSIS OF WIRELESS CONNECTIVITY IN SENSOR NETWORK DEPLOYMENTS FOR ASSISTED LIVING AT HOME

摘要

Healthcare and, in particular, telehealth applications are prospective areas for using low power, wireless sensors for remote monitoring. Elderly people can ask for remote as-sistance with the help of wireless sensor networks and stay at home with comfort and added security. In this paper, em-pirical analysis of the robustness of wireless connectivity in sensor network deployments is presented. Beyond the connectivity issue, some guidelines for deploying sensors in a typical household setting are presented. The wireless connectivity of triangular, rectangular, square and random deployment patterns are presented and compared, as well as the effect of changing the radio frequency power level of the nodes on the variation of the wireless connectivity in terms of: the link quality indicators, the packet reception rate, and the yield for each node. From the experimental results using tmote sky sensor nodes in the different de-ployment patterns, the wireless connectivity of the nodes were found to not vary significantly in a typical room of ≈7.08 meter × 3.29 meter (l × w). The nodes have an overall good yield, link quality, and packet reception rate at any place in the room.