Effective routing with utilisation of cross-layer information for industrial wireless sensor networks

In recent years, wireless sensor networks have become an attractive solution for various types of applications. The significant improvements in micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) technology enables manufacturers to create low-cost but powerful wireless sensing devices. Wireless sensor systems can be deployed in industrial application environments without the infrastructure, which wired systems require, making them an attractive solution for industrial applications. However, providing reliable data transmission in a wireless environment is a complicated task, especially in harsh conditions in industrial areas. One major issue is that the condition of the wireless channel can suddenly change from good to bad within a small period of time. Another major issue is that deploying a large number of sensor devices increases the complexity of the wireless networks. Therefore, network protocols such as routing, which is the main focus of this thesis, for industrial wireless sensor networks (WSNs) must be designed to provide reliable data transmission under such harsh conditions and also support large scale deployment effectively. This thesis addresses the issues of scalability and reliable data transmission through effective routing with utilisation of cross-layer information in industrial WSNs. For the scalability issue, depending on the application scenarios, either proactive or reactive routing mechanisms could be employed. However, both of them have some drawbacks when implemented in large scale networks. Reactive routing will likely entail a large amount of delay due to its route discovery process; while proactive routing can create a large amount of routing overhead in the presence of a large number of sensor nodes in the network. This thesis makes use of the proactive routing mechanism with our own developments. Our design combines the proactive routing mechanism with the multipath routing mechanism, leading to a routing solution that can effectively provide prompt responses to sudden changes in the network condition. For the reliable data transmission issue in industrial WSNs, existing solutions mainly focus on supporting a single type of network