Simulation-Based Evaluation of Reliability and Data Continuity in IoT-Based Environmental Quality Monitoring Under Traffic and Failure Scenarios

Abstract

Data continuity problems in environmental monitoring systems due to congestion in communication traffic, interference from wireless communications, and failure of components present a great problem in maintaining accurate and reliable data continuity and environment assessment results. This paper proposes the development of a simulation framework for evaluating the reliability and data continuity of the distributed IoT-based environmental quality monitoring system with different traffic intensities, wireless communication interference levels, and component failures. The reliability performance measures include: data delivery ratio (DDR), packet loss ratio (PLR), transmission delays, system availability, time in interruption state and data continuity ratio (DCR). Based on simulation analysis, the proposed distributed IoT environmental monitoring system has DDR and DCR of 0.971 when the network is under baseline operations. Under high traffic intensity, DDR was reduced to 0.734 while under high traffic and high interference conditions, DDR is reduced to 0.420 while PLR was 0.580. Under gateway component failure, DDR was reduced to 0.409 while under high traffic, high interference, and component failure condition, DCR was 0.487 or a 49.8% reduction from baseline. The recovery techniques have helped significantly increase the availability of the system when the environment is degraded. This indicates that the main factors that determine the reliability of IoT-enabled environmental monitoring systems are gateway resilience and communication efficiency.