Characterization and adaptive selection of radio channels for reliable and energy-efficient WSN

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) currently see a strong increase in demand for various industrial applications like smart testing and production systems. Open frequency bands (e.g. 2.4 GHz) allow the use of commercial low-cost hardware, but need to be shared with other devices and systems, leading to interference and therefore transmission errors. Re-transmitting damaged packages might eventually succeed, but at the costs of increased latency and additional energy consumption of the node. As minimizing energy consumption is paramount for self-owered WSN nodes, interference avoidance is highly desired. In this work a channel management procedure for WSNs is proposed which can react to dynamically changing interference scenarios. A short monitoring period is used to sample received signal strength indication values of a set of candidate frequency bands. An extensive measurement campaign is performed and six analysis methods are compared, and effects of applying the resulting choice of “best” frequency bands to WSNs in an automotive testing environment are investigated. The best method allows a reduction of energy consumption of a node by about 15%.