The β-factor: measuring wireless link burstiness

  • Authors:
  • Kannan Srinivasan;Maria A. Kazandjieva;Saatvik Agarwal;Philip Levis

  • Affiliations:
  • Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Embedded network sensor systems
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Measuring 802.15.4 reception in three testbeds, we find that most intermediate links are bursty: they shift between poor and good delivery. We present a metric to measure this link burstiness and name it β. We find that link burstiness affects protocol performance and that β can predict the effects. We show that measuring β allows us to reason about how long a protocol should pause after encountering a packet failure to reduce its transmission cost. We find that using β as a guide to setting a single constant in a standard sensor network data collection protocol reduces its average transmission cost by 15%. In addition to data from 802.15.4 testbeds, we examine traces from 802.11b networks and find β has a broader relevance in the wireless domain.