DCA-a distributed channel allocation scheme for wireless sensor networks

This paper introduces a distributed channel assignment scheme (DCA) for wireless sensor networks. Recent developments in sensor technology, as seen in Berkeley's Mica2 Mote, Rockwell's WINS nodes and the IEEE 802.15.4 Zigbee, have enabled support for single-transceiver, multi-channel communication. DCA exploits this capability by assigning optimally minimum channels in a distributed manner in order to make subsequent communication free from both primary and secondary interference. The main contribution of this paper is solving the channel assignment problem, also named as the 2-hop coloring problem, in which repetition of colors occurs only if the nodes are separated by more than 2 hops. Our work achieves legal coloring under energy constrained conditions for sensor networks and significant performance improvements are shown when compared with similar existing schemes. Finally, we validate our approach through extensive analysis and simulation results.