Poster abstract: On the spatial characteristics of the gray region for 802.15.4 radios
Yin Chen, Andreas Terzis · 2009
Packet loss and energy consumption in sensor networks depend critically on the quality of the network’s wire-less links. In turn, link quality depends on the envi-ronment in which the RF signals propagate and the lo-cations of the link’s endpoints. Experimental results have shown that a low-power wireless link can be in one of three states or ‘regions’, as the inter-node dis-tance increases: connected, transitional (gray), and dis-connected. The gray region is characterized by extreme variability, whereby small differences in distance or end-point locations can lead to pronounced differences in loss rates. However, not all is lost. This work investigates the spatial characteristics of the gray region and exper-imentally shows that one can efficiently identify links with low loss rates within the radio’s gray region. One of the possible applications of this finding is in the de-sign of sparse, yet low-loss network deployments. 1.