## 1 Introduction  
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) aim at developing cross-domain solutions from the interaction of the physical world, the world made of real daily objects like cars, buildings, robots, medical wearable devices, traffic lights and so on, and the virtual world, the world where computational representations of such objects exist. CPS will enable the readily development of applications for smart transportation, e-Health, smart grid and factories of the future domains, among others, by orchestrating, managing and controlling the physical objects and their emergent behavior by means of their virtual computational representation. In recent years, advances in wireless communication technologies and their benefits [1], have entailed a greater application of these technologies for supporting communication in CPS. Thus, the Wireless Sensors Networks (WSN), a well-known wireless technology that connects sensors and actuators, are becoming part of large CPS. The WSN aims at monitoring a physical system and relaying data to a targeted processing element. However, as mentioned in [2] and considering the CPS overall design requirements in [3] and the time requirements to be fulfilled when interacting with physical objects [4], there are relevant challenges that WSN have to overcome in order to be fully integrable in CPS, and the energy consumption and the communication reliability are two important aspects targeted in this paper. Reliability of wireless communications can be affected by several factors such as the environment, the frequency and modulation used, and even the orientation of the sensor antenna introduces radio irregularities [5]. In the current available literature is possible to find several studies that analyze the level of influence of some of these factors in wireless communication, also suggesting methods and techniques to address them and thus improve the reliability and robustness of wireless communication technologies. [PERSON] _et al._[6] have been working on the problem of Transmission Power Control (TPC) for WSN by measuring the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) in order to analyze the link quality between the nodes and comparing different filtering techniques for link quality prediction. [PERSON] _et al._[7] have studied the reliability of protocols used in WSN concluding among other things that cross layer design should be further exploited to achieve reliability. [PERSON] _et al._[8] proposed a dual radio network architecture to improve communication reliability in WSN, with a minor increase in energy consumption. The research and development carried out in this work are based on the hypothesis that the adaptive connectivity between wireless nodes in the network and a certain number of neighboring nodes, improves reliability of the network communications. The main scientific and technical contributions are the use of intelligent control techniques, such as fuzzy control, for developing the adaptation strategy and its validation in a physical scenario. The theoretical foundations for the proposed contributions has been introduced in a previous work [9]. Briefly, the likelihood for a node in a WSN to reach the WSN sink, which collects and processes the nodes data, depends on the number of neighbors. A higher number of neighbors implies a higher likelihood. In [9] you can find the rationale for an optimal number of neighbors that guarantees an acceptable likelihood. The optimal number of neighbors depends on the WSN deployment area and the density of nodes (number of nodes per m\({}^{2}\)). Therefore, each WSN node should adapt its power transmission to guarantee the WSN optimal number of neighbors, thus achieving a better energy saving. The current work goes an step forward by presenting the results under the basement of empirical evidences and by also applying engineering methodologies for the design and development process.