Link quality-based channel selection for resource constrained WSNs

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) consist of autonomous and intelligent nodes that combine sensing, actuation, and distributed computing with small size and low energy. One of the major issues is overcoming the non-ideality of unreliable real-world wireless links and avoiding interferences. This paper presents a link quality-based lightweight channel selection mechanism that discovers low interference and lightly loaded channels, thus improving latency, reliability, and throughput. The mechanism grades a channel from link reliability and changes the channel on interference. The proposed selection is suitable for resource and energy constrained WSNs as it does not require any extra communication or channel sensing. The channel selection is implemented with a low energy 2.4 GHz multihop mesh WSN using 1 mW transmission power. In practical measurements in a typical office environment with 100 mW WLAN interference, the selection had 96% average link reliability compared to the 84% of randomized channel selection. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.