RAFH: Reliable Aware Frequency Hopping Method for Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Frequency hopping is adopted by many protocols to improve the reliability and security because of the complex and hash environment of industrial wireless sensor networks. However, the performance of frequency hopping is closely related to the link characteristics. Through the measurement and analysis of the link characteristics in industrial environment, we found that the link is time-varying but stable at a relative long period as well. This paper proposed an adaptive frequency hopping method, which change to a new channel only when the packet drop rate of the channel beyond given threshold. The results of simulating and testing show that adaptive frequency hopping can increase the network reliability by 10~20% than slotted frequency hopping.