A Distributed Hybrid Channel Selection and Routing Technique for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose Well-Connected Dominating Set Channel Assignment (WCDS-CA), a distributed hybrid algorithm that uses a well-connected dominating set to perform a selection of communication channels in wireless sensor networks in such a way that the number of channels used and interference among sensor nodes remains minimal. Since the network topology allows each sensor node to be equipped with several radio interfaces, a set of parents and leaves are statically assigned to a single fixed channel. The routers are assigned to several orthogonal channels using the corresponding radio interfaces in such a way that they can switch dynamically to the static channels of parent nodes in order to minimize network interference. The tree based on Breadth-First Search is built out from the sink, with the result that the shortest between each sensor and the sink is established. This allows the data to be efficiently propagated from parent to router to parent towards the sink in order to reduce the number of individual transmissions. We compare the results obtained with those for a single channel by taking the common links used by each node on each channel and packets transmitted as performance criteria, and show that our proposal gives better results in dense wireless sensor networks.