Radio link quality estimation in wireless sensor networks: A survey
ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN)
SoNIC: classifying interference in 802.15.4 sensor networks
Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Information processing in sensor networks
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Home area networks (HANs) promise to enable sophisticated home automation applications such as smart energy usage and assisted living. However, recent empirical study of HAN reliability in real-world residential environments revealed significant challenges to achieving reliable performance in the face of significant and variable interference from a multitude of coexisting wireless devices. We propose the Adaptive and Robust Channel Hopping (ARCH) protocol: a lightweight receiver-oriented protocol which handles the dynamics of residential environments by reactively channel hopping when channel conditions have degraded. ARCH has several key features. First, ARCH is an adaptive protocol that channel-hops based on changes in channel quality observed in real time. Second, ARCH is a distributed protocol that selects channels on a per-link basis, due to the large link-to-link variations in channel quality observed under empirical study. Third, ARCH is designed to be robust and lightweight. ARCH uses a practical handshaking approach to handle channel desynchronization and an efficient sliding-window scheme that does not involve expensive calculations or modeling, and can be reasonably implemented on memory-constrained wireless sensor platforms. Fourth, ARCH introduces minimal communication overhead for applications where packet acknowledgements are already enabled. We evaluate our approach through real deployment in real-life apartments with residents' daily activity. Our results demonstrate that ARCH can reduce packet retransmissions by a median of 42.3% compared to using a single, fixed wireless channel, and can enable up to a 2.2X improvement in delivery rate on the most unreliable links in our experiment. Under a multi-hop routing scenario, ARCH reduced radio usage by 31.6% on average, by reducing the ETX of each link by up to 83.6%. Due to ARCH's lightweight reactive design, most links achieve this improvement in reliability with 10 or fewer channel hops per day.