Poster Abstract: Agreement for Wireless Sensor Networks under External Interference
Carlo Alberto Boano, Kay Römer, Thiemo Voigt, Marco Antonio Zúñiga · International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks · 2012
Wireless sensor nodes often need to agree on fundamental pieces of information: at the MAC layer, sensor nodes may need to agree on a new time slot or frequency channel; at the application layer they may need to agree on handing over a leader role from one node to another. With the increasing congestion of the unregulated ISM frequencies, the quality of communications deteriorates, leading to packet loss and higher latencies that may break agreement in two different ways: none of the nodes agree on the new information (time slot, frequency channel) and stick with the previous state, or – even worse – some nodes agree on the new information and some do not. In this work, we propose a protocol that exploits jamming instead of message transmissions to confirm the reception of a packet. We show that, in the presence of common interference patterns, this approach outperforms packet-based handshake protocols in terms of both agreement probability and energy consumption.