Analysis and evaluation of the establishment and maintenance of paths in a MANET used for industrial process monitoring

•We model a complete mobile ad hoc network with stochastic activity networks.•We obtain the exact route after the requesting of information.•We study the effect of mobility on the maintenance and recovering of the route.•We evaluate if the services offered in an industrial environment are affected.

The use of wireless networks is having an ever greater impact on systems controlling automation, industrial manufacturing, distributed control and supervision. Wireless technologies in particular have penetrated quickly the area of control of public utilities networks, and typical examples of this are remote control and supervision of large water, gas or electricity distribution networks. These types of networks are usually formed of a central station and different remote stations, and remote clients who are able to remotely monitor or even control the working of the system. To improve the use of the system, the remote stations must have the capacity to exchange information between each other and with the central station. The spontaneous generation of wireless networks in remote stations to exchange information between workers is a possible solution. Taking into account the characteristics of this type of monitoring system, the paper has proposed a scenario (number of nodes, area size, mobility) and has modeled, using stochastic activity networks (SAN), the operation of an ad hoc network that uses a reactive routing protocol to determine if the network is able to offer the typical services of these facilities (images or video streaming and alerts).