Interference characterization and mitigation in large-scale wireless sensor networks
Andreas Terzis, Chieh-Jan Mike Liang · 2011
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) provide novel insights into our world by enabling data collection at unprecedented spatial and temporal scales. Over the past decade, the WSN community has significantly improved the success rate and the efficiency of WSN deployments through progress in networking primitives, operating systems, programming languages, and sensor mote hardware design. However, as WSN deployments grow in scale and are embedded in more places, their performance becomes increasingly susceptible to interference from external sources, as well as poor coordination in the radio transmissions of the network's nodes. This thesis is a coordinated effort to study three types of radio interference in the context of large-scale WSNs: intra-network, external, and protocol interference. The first part of the dissertation introduces the Typhoon and WRAP protocols that minimize interference from concurrent transmitters; Typhoon leverages channel diversity to improve data dissemination performance and WRAP uses a token-passing mechanism to coordinate data collection traffic in a network. Then, the dissertation characterizes the external interference from 802.11 traffic to 802.15.4 networks and introduces the BuzzBuzz protocol that uses multiple redundancy techniques to improve the 802.15.4 packet reception ratio. The final part of the dissertation presents ViR that multiplexes a single physical radio to satisfy requests from multiple protocols or applications on the same node.