Eliminating Mapping Error of Link Quality Prediction for Low-Power Wireless Networks

The size of time windows used by low-power wireless protocols to compute packet reception ratio (PRR) directly affects the accuracy and agility of link quality prediction. Using small time windows would make the prediction more agile, but its accuracy decreases seriously. To improve the accuracy while maintaining agility, many existing methods generally predict the physical layer parameters within small time windows first and then calculate the PRR using mapping models of such parameters and PRR. However, due to the propagation characteristics of wireless signal, these mapping models usually introduce large errors. The mapping error will superimpose on the prediction error of physical layer parameters, which would inevitably degrade the accuracy and reliability of PRR prediction. This article proposes to eliminate the step of mapping from physical layer parameters to PRR and directly use the historical series of PRR computed within small time windows as input parameters to build prediction model. Then, the PRR within large time windows could be predicted. This effectively avoids the errors introduced by using mapping models while not sacrificing the agility. To verify the proposed method, several machine learning algorithms were chosen to implement the prediction model. Compared with similar methods based on mapping models, the proposed one could achieve higher accuracy under different sizes of time windows. Specifically, under large time windows which are commonly used to describe PRR in practice, its accuracy is much higher. More importantly, agility of the proposed method is basically equivalent or even superior to existing ones.