Transmission power control for interference minimization in WSNs

Typical home automation systems consist of dense populated sensors and actuators in wireless networks. In apartment houses, networks are often deployed closely to each other by different neighbors. In such scenarios wireless networks suffer from packet loss caused by interference with other networks. Packet loss causes unnecessary delay and energy consumption. To overcome this, transmission power control can be used to lower the interference. However, reducing the interference is a rarely used capability of transmission power control. This paper presents transmission power control based on a P-controller. The feedback loop for the signal-to-noise ratio is realized by modifying the link layer acknowledgments of IEEE 802.15.4. The evaluation of the system is performed in a real-world testbed. It shows the benefit of reducing the transmission power in dense networks. The application layer loss can be lowered by 5%.