Frame Counter: Achieving Accurate and Real-Time Link Estimation in Low Power Wireless Sensor Networks

Link estimation is a fundamental component of forwarding protocols in wireless sensor networks. In low power forwarding, however, the asynchronous nature of widely adopted duty-cycled radio control brings new challenges to achieve accurate and real- time estimation. First, the repeatedly transmitted frames (called wake-up frame) increase the complexity of accurate statistic, especially with bursty channel contention and coexistent interference. Second, frequent update of every link status exhausts the limited energy supply due to long duration of beacon broadcast. In this paper, we propose meter (Distributed Frame Counter), which takes the opportunities of link overhearing to update link status in real time. Furthermore, meter does not only depend on counting the successfully decoded wake-up frames, but also counts the corrupted ones by exploiting the feasibility of ZigBee identification based on short-term sequence of the received signal strength. We implement meter in TinyOS and further evaluate the performance through extensive experiments on indoor and outdoor testbeds. The results demonstrate that meter can significantly improve the performance of the state-of-the-art link estimation schemes.