Adaptive Channel Selection for Interference Reduction in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract:
The ISM-Band gets more and more popular. Therefore, an increasing number of devices use the same frequency band. In many cases this results in interference between the different networks these devices form. For low power wireless standards like IEEE 802.15.4 this interference is challenging because most other standards are using a much higher transmission power. We present an adaptive system that is able to observe characteristics of its communication channel and to control a switch of all network nodes to a channel with less interference. Therefore, the system ranks all channels against each other and determines the best one. The approach considers the special challenges which appear in (ad-hoc) wireless sensor networks without a central instance. We also propose a new link quality estimation function. The evaluation of the system was performed in a real world testbed inside an office building. In this realistic scenario our mechanism lowers the packet loss significantly.