Abstract
Industrial wireless applications often share the communication channel with other wireless technologies and communication protocols. This coexistence produces interferences and transmission errors which require appropriate mechanisms to manage retransmissions. Nevertheless, these mechanisms increase the network latency and overhead due to the retransmissions. Thus, the loss of data packets and the measures to handle them produce an undesirable drop in the QoS and hinder the overall robustness and energy efficiency of the network. Interference avoidance mechanisms, such as frequency hopping techniques, reduce the need for retransmissions due to interferences but they are often tailored to specific scenarios and are not easily adapted to other use cases. On the other hand, the total absence of interference avoidance mechanisms introduces a security risk because the communication channel may be intentionally attacked and interfered with to hinder or totally block it. In this paper we propose a method for supporting the design of communication solutions under dynamic channel interference conditions and we implement dynamic management policies for frequency hopping technique and channel selection at runtime. The method considers several standard frequency hopping techniques and quality metrics, and the quality and status of the available frequency channels to propose the best combined solution to minimize the side effects of interferences. A simulation tool has been developed and used in this work to validate the method.
Highlights
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are one of the industrial applications that benefit the most from the license-free nature of the Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) band
Even though the same analysis could have been done starting from real Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) measurements of any specific scenario
We presented a method for selecting the best frequency hopping strategy
Summary
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are one of the industrial applications that benefit the most from the license-free nature of the Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) band. The ISM band has to be shared with other devices and systems using standard communication protocols such as Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) or Bluetooth [1] This situation leads to interferences in the communication channel and, as a result, produces (pseudo-) random transmission errors. Re-transmitting interfered packets might eventually succeed, but at the expense of increased latency and energy consumption of the devices. Lost packets and increased latency directly affect the QoS of the network, first by the direct loss of arbitrary packets and second by the side effects of the missed packets such as breaking a multi message or state-full process that has to be started from the beginning (i.e., pairing, network establishment, discovery, etc.) [2].
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