Understanding the causes of packet delivery success and failure in dense wireless sensor networks

  • Authors:
  • Kannan Srinivasan;Prabal Dutta;Arsalan Tavakoli;Philip Levis

  • Affiliations:
  • Stanford University;UC Berkeley;UC Berkeley;Stanford University

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

We present empirical measurements of the packet delivery performance of the Telos and MicaZ sensor platforms. At a high level, their behavior is similar to that of earlier platforms. They exhibit a reception "grey region," and temporal variations in packet loss. Looking more deeply, however, there are subtle differences, and looking deeper still, the patterns behind these complexities become clear. Environmental noise (802.11b) has high spatial correlation. Packet loss occurs when a receiver operating near its noise floor experiences a small decrease in received signal strength, rather than an increase in environmental noise. These variations cause the reception "grey region." Packet losses are highly correlated over short time periods, but are independent over longer periods. Based on these findings, current practices could be easily changed that would greatly improve efficiency and performance.