Measuring and Monitoring Reliability of Wireless Networks

In the future, connected vehicles and automated factories will increasingly use wireless communication. Because the cost of communication failures in these applications is high, the wireless networks must be reliable and continuously monitored. To address this need, we propose a general approach to determine the reliability of wireless networks and describe implementations of it. Our approach focuses on checking necessary assumptions instead of assuming they are fulfilled. We successfully tested our methods in an operating industrial environment. Our tests show that both the initial measurement of the reliability of the wireless network and continued monitoring are a helpful tool for factory operators. In the future, methods such as those described in this article should be used to ensure the reliable operation of wireless networks in critical scenarios.