A Lightweight Interference Measurement Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The most applications of wireless sensor network have stringent requirements for communication performance. To meet applications requirements, it is crucial to measure the wireless interference between nodes, which is the major factor that reduces the performance of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, the key problem of accurately measuring wireless interference is that the node cannot predict the neighbor node information after the network is deployed, and thus cannot establish the correspondence between the wireless interference strength and the neighbor node. To tackle this problem, this paper presents a lightweight interference measurement algorithm for WSNs. The algorithm divides the interference measurement process into three phases. The first two phases are used to gather all two-hop neighbor information by exchanging between nodes. In the third phase, each node performs interference measurements and builds the relationship of wireless interference between nodes. The experimental results show that our proposed approaches can obtain accurate inter-node wireless interference strength with low energy and communication overhead.