{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,12]],"date-time":"2025-10-12T03:18:37Z","timestamp":1760239117329,"version":"build-2065373602"},"reference-count":33,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"18","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2020,9,17]],"date-time":"2020-09-17T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1600300800000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["61601069"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["61601069"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100013223","name":"Chongqing Research Program of Basic Research and Frontier Technology","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["cstc2017jcyjAX0254","cstc2016jcyjA1626"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["cstc2017jcyjAX0254","cstc2016jcyjA1626"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100013223","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Sensors"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Hardware-based link quality estimators (LQEs) in wireless sensor networks generally use physical layer parameters to estimate packet reception ratio, which has advantages of high agility and low overhead. However, many existing studies didn\u2019t consider the impacts of environmental changes on the applicability of these estimators. This paper compares the performance of typical hardware-based LQEs in different environments. Meanwhile, aiming at the problematic Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) calculation used in existing studies, a more reasonable calculation method is proposed. The results show that it is not accurate to estimate the packet reception rate using the communication distance, and it may be useless when the environment changes. Meanwhile, the fluctuation range of the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) and SNR will be affected and that of Link Quality Indicator (LQI) is almost unchanged. The performance of RSSI based LQEs may degrade when the environment changes. Fortunately, this degradation is mainly caused by the change of background noise, which could be compensated conveniently. The best environmental adaptability is gained by LQI and SNR based LQEs, as they are almost unaffected when the environment changes. Moreover, LQI based LQEs are more accurate than SNR based ones in the transitional region. Nevertheless, compared with SNR, the fluctuation range of LQI is much larger, which needs a larger smoothing window to converge. In addition, the calculation of LQI is typically vendor-specific. Therefore, the tradeoff between accuracy, agility, and convenience should be considered in practice.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/s20185327","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2020,9,18]],"date-time":"2020-09-18T07:27:33Z","timestamp":1600414053000},"page":"5327","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":7,"title":["Environmental Impacts on Hardware-Based Link Quality Estimators in Wireless Sensor Networks"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"20","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-9342-4838","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Wei","family":"Liu","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Chongqing University of Technology, Chongqing 400054, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Yu","family":"Xia","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Chongqing University of Technology, Chongqing 400054, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Daqing","family":"Zheng","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Chongqing University of Technology, Chongqing 400054, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Jian","family":"Xie","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Chongqing University of Technology, Chongqing 400054, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Rong","family":"Luo","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Shunren","family":"Hu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Chongqing University of Technology, Chongqing 400054, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2020,9,17]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"229","DOI":"10.1108\/SR-08-2014-683","article-title":"Recent trend in wireless sensor network and its applications: A survey","volume":"35","author":"Prasad","year":"2015","journal-title":"Sens. Rev."},{"key":"ref_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1","DOI":"10.1145\/2240116.2240123","article-title":"Radio link quality estimation in wireless sensor networks: A survey","volume":"8","author":"Baccour","year":"2012","journal-title":"ACM Trans. Sens. Netw."},{"key":"ref_3","unstructured":"Woo, A., and Culler, D. (2003). Evaluation of Efficient Link Reliability Estimators for Low-Power Wireless Networks, EECS Department, University of California. Technical Report UCB\/CSD-03-1270."},{"key":"ref_4","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Baccour, N., Koubaa, A., Youssef, H., Jamaa, M.B., Rosario, D., Alves, M., and Becker, L.B. (2010, January 17\u201319). F-LQE: A fuzzy link quality estimator for wireless sensor networks. Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks, Coimbra, Portugal.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-642-11917-0_16"},{"key":"ref_5","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Rekik, S., Baccour, N., Jmaiel, M., and Drira, K. (2015, January 24\u201328). Low-power link quality estimation in smart grid environments. Proceedings of the International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference, Dubrovnik, Croatia.","DOI":"10.1109\/IWCMC.2015.7289255"},{"key":"ref_6","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1543","DOI":"10.1007\/s11277-016-3697-7","article-title":"Link quality estimation for adaptive data streaming in WSN","volume":"94","author":"Jayasri","year":"2016","journal-title":"Wirel. Pers. Commun."},{"key":"ref_7","first-page":"48","article-title":"FaLQE: Fluctuation adaptive link quality estimator for wireless sensor networks","volume":"1101","author":"Liu","year":"2019","journal-title":"Commun. Comput. Inf. Sci."},{"key":"ref_8","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Senel, M., Chintalapudi, K., Lal, D., Keshavarzian, A., and Coyle, E.J. (2007, January 26\u201330). A kalman filter based link quality estimation scheme for wireless sensor networks. Proceedings of the IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, Washington, DC, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/GLOCOM.2007.169"},{"key":"ref_9","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Zhao, J., and Govindan, R. (2003, January 5\u20137). Understanding packet delivery performance in dense wireless sensor networks. Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, Los Angeles, CA, USA.","DOI":"10.1145\/958491.958493"},{"key":"ref_10","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Srinivasan, K., Kazandjieva, M.A., Agarwal, S., and Levis, P. (2008, January 5\u20137). The \u03b2-factor: Measuring wireless link burstiness. Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, Raleigh, NC, USA.","DOI":"10.1145\/1460412.1460416"},{"key":"ref_11","first-page":"255","article-title":"Effect evaluation of one-hop transmission distance vs performance in wireless sensor network","volume":"33","author":"Liu","year":"2012","journal-title":"J. Commun."},{"key":"ref_12","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1127","DOI":"10.1109\/TASE.2017.2739342","article-title":"End-to-end data delivery reliability model for estimating and optimizing the link quality of industrial WSNs","volume":"15","author":"Sun","year":"2018","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Autom. Sci. Eng."},{"key":"ref_13","unstructured":"(2020, April 01). Texas Instruments, Inc. CC2420. Available online: http:\/\/www.ti.com\/lit\/ds\/symlink\/cc2420.pdf."},{"key":"ref_14","unstructured":"(2020, April 01). Microchip, Inc. AT86RF230. Available online: https:\/\/www.microchip.com\/wwwproducts\/en\/at86rf230."},{"key":"ref_15","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Bildea, A., Alphand, O., Rousseau, F., and Duda, A. (2013, January 8\u201311). Link quality metrics in large scale indoor wireless sensor networks. Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Personal Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications, London, UK.","DOI":"10.1109\/PIMRC.2013.6666451"},{"key":"ref_16","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1","DOI":"10.1016\/S1005-8885(13)60001-1","article-title":"CCI-based link quality estimation mechanism for wireless sensor networks under non-perceived packet loss","volume":"20","author":"Shu","year":"2013","journal-title":"J. China Univ. Posts Telecommun."},{"key":"ref_17","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1626","DOI":"10.3923\/itj.2013.1626.1631","article-title":"A new link quality estimation mechanism based on LQI in WSN","volume":"12","author":"Luo","year":"2013","journal-title":"Inf. Technol. J."},{"key":"ref_18","first-page":"1","article-title":"Impact of LQI-Based routing metrics on the performance of a one-to-one routing protocol for IEEE 802.15.4 multihop networks","volume":"6","author":"Carles","year":"2010","journal-title":"Eurasip J. Wirel. Commun. Netw."},{"key":"ref_19","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"116","DOI":"10.1016\/j.adhoc.2017.02.007","article-title":"Real-time link quality estimation for industrial wireless sensor networks using dedicated nodes","volume":"59","author":"Gomes","year":"2017","journal-title":"Ad Hoc Netw."},{"key":"ref_20","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"351","DOI":"10.1016\/j.comnet.2016.10.010","article-title":"RECODAN: An efficient redundancy coding-based data transmission scheme for wireless sensor networks","volume":"110","author":"Ye","year":"2016","journal-title":"Comput. Netw."},{"key":"ref_21","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"12788","DOI":"10.1109\/ACCESS.2017.2723360","article-title":"WNN-LQE: Wavelet-neural-network-based link quality estimation for smart grid WSNs","volume":"5","author":"Sun","year":"2017","journal-title":"IEEE Access"},{"key":"ref_22","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"278","DOI":"10.1109\/TMC.2015.2416182","article-title":"Accuracy-aware interference modeling and measurement in wireless sensor networks","volume":"15","author":"Chang","year":"2016","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput."},{"key":"ref_23","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1","DOI":"10.1145\/1689239.1689246","article-title":"An empirical study of low-power wireless","volume":"6","author":"Srinivasan","year":"2010","journal-title":"ACM Trans. Sens. Netw."},{"key":"ref_24","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"944","DOI":"10.1016\/j.adhoc.2012.11.002","article-title":"Effective-SNR estimation for wireless sensor network using Kalman filter","volume":"11","author":"Qin","year":"2013","journal-title":"Ad Hoc Netw."},{"key":"ref_25","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Liu, W., Xia, Y., Luo, R., and Hu, S. (2019, January 8\u201311). Lightweight multi-parameter fusion link quality estimation based on weighted Euclidean distance. Proceedings of the 30th Annual IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications, Istanbul, Turkey.","DOI":"10.1109\/PIMRC.2019.8904304"},{"key":"ref_26","first-page":"1","article-title":"Data-driven link quality prediction using link features","volume":"10","author":"Liu","year":"2014","journal-title":"ACM Trans. Sens. Netw."},{"key":"ref_27","first-page":"1","article-title":"Temporal adaptive link quality prediction with online learning","volume":"10","author":"Liu","year":"2014","journal-title":"ACM Trans. Sens. Netw."},{"key":"ref_28","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Marinca, D., and Minet, D. (2014, January 8\u201312). On-line learning and prediction of link quality in wireless sensor networks. Proceedings of the IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, Austin, TX, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/GLOCOM.2014.7036979"},{"key":"ref_29","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Fu, S., Ceriotti, M., Jiang, Y., Shih, C., Huan, X., and Marron, P.J. (2018, January 11\u201313). An approach to detect anomalous degradation in signal strength of IEEE 802.15.4 links. Proceedings of the 15th Annual IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking, Hong Kong, China.","DOI":"10.1109\/SAHCN.2018.8397126"},{"key":"ref_30","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"377","DOI":"10.1049\/cje.2017.01.013","article-title":"Research on link quality estimation mechanism for wireless sensor networks based on support vector machine","volume":"26","author":"Shu","year":"2017","journal-title":"Chin. J. Electron."},{"key":"ref_31","unstructured":"(2020, April 01). MEMSIC, Inc. TelosB Datasheet. Available online: http:\/\/www.memsic.cn\/userfiles\/files\/6020-0094-02_B_TELOSB.pdf."},{"key":"ref_32","unstructured":"Zheng, G., Han, D., Zheng, R., Schmitz, C., and Yuan, X. (2011, January 5\u20139). A link quality inference model for IEEE 802.15.4 low-rate WPANs. Proceedings of the IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, Kathmandu, Nepal."},{"key":"ref_33","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1766","DOI":"10.1109\/TVT.2014.2334494","article-title":"Ubiquitous, yet deceptive: Hardware-based channel metrics on interfered WSN links","volume":"64","author":"Filip","year":"2015","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol."}],"container-title":["Sensors"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1424-8220\/20\/18\/5327\/pdf","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,11]],"date-time":"2025-10-11T10:10:59Z","timestamp":1760177459000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1424-8220\/20\/18\/5327"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2020,9,17]]},"references-count":33,"journal-issue":{"issue":"18","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2020,9]]}},"alternative-id":["s20185327"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/s20185327","relation":{},"ISSN":["1424-8220"],"issn-type":[{"type":"electronic","value":"1424-8220"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2020,9,17]]}}}