Dynamic channel management for advanced, energy-efficient sensor-actor-networks

Actual research projects in the fields of wireless communication systems focus on distributed, heterogeneous architectures for advanced sensor-actor-networks (SNETs). Each subsystem provides specific capabilities for measuring or manipulating its environment. At the same time, a huge amount of sensor, status and control data has to be transmitted over different network interfaces and communication standards. During the runtime, the number and the quality of communication channels is changing dynamically. Especially in wireless multi-hop scenarios with multiple radio standards, the maintenance of stable communication paths is critical. In this context, we present a novel radio-standard-spanning channel and resource management approach in the domain of heterogeneous sensor-actor-networks. We are now able to ensure efficient communication channels and load-balancing features for mobile Ad Hoc and sensor network scenarios, including on-demand channel reallocation capabilities. For this purpose, we developed a real-time radio standard integration concept and respective routing algorithms with adaptive multi-standard, multi-interface metrics. In order to evaluate the conceptual advantages of the proposed approach, we designed and implemented a real-world demonstrator. The measured results on this hardware prototype platform clarifies the feasibility of an energy-efficient channel management in heterogeneous WSN/SANET environments.