Blacklisting-Based Channel Hopping Approaches in Low-Power and Lossy Networks

More and more industrial applications require high reliability while relying on low-power devices for their flexibility. Unfortunately, radio transmissions are prone to unreliability and are very sensitive to external interference. Therefore, a great amount of effort has been put into channel hopping approaches, which help to combat external interference by reducing the number of packet losses. This approach is combined with a strict schedule of transmissions to allow devices to save energy. However, some of the radio channels are subjected to strong interference. Blacklisting techniques identify the interfered radio channels that demonstrate low packet delivery ratio and avoid using them to transmit data packets. In this article, we study different distributed and global blacklisting techniques and investigate their dependencies on the scheduling algorithm. We also present a new scheme to exploit a blacklist by making the employed scheduling algorithm blacklist-aware. Our results rely on a real experimental dataset to quantify the performance of all these approaches and demonstrate the interest of blacklisting to improve network reliability.