Benchmarking the Robustness of Cellular Up-Links in Automatic Weather Station Networks

We present a problem for benchmarking the robustness of cellular up-links, in an automatic weather station (AWS) testbed. Based on the problem, we conduct a small-scale measurement study of robustness, where the AWS is equipped with four (4) cellular modems for weather data delivery. The effectiveness of up-links is challenging because of overlapping spatial-temporal factors such as the presence of good reflectors that lead to multi-path effects, interference, network load or other reasons. We argue that, there is a strong need for independent assessments of their robustness, to perform end-to-end network measurement. However, it is yet difficult to go from a particular measurement to an assessment of the entire network. We extensively measure the variability of Radio Signal Strength (RSSI) as link metric on the cellular modems. The RSSI is one of the important link metrics that can determine the robustness of received RF signals, and explore how they differed from one another at a particular location and instant time. We also apply the statistical analysis that quantifies the level of stability by considering the robustness, referring short-term variation, and determines good up-link in comparison to weak one. The results show that the robustness of cellular up-links exists for an unpredictable period of time and lower than one could hope. More than 50% of up-links are intermittent. Therefore, we plan to extend our work by exploring RSSI thresholds, to develop a classification scheme supporting a decision whether a link is either intermittent or not. This will help in normalizing the level of stability, to design the RSSI estimation metric for the robust routing protocol in weather data networks.