A Solution for Local Channel Collisions in Sensor Networks

Abstract

The energy performance of sensor nodes which are deployed in arbitrary regions in sensor networks is an important issue. Clustering of the network is a method to make nodes to groups based on geographical position. Nodes on the clustering sensor networks can reduces the communication traffics of inter-node communications and raises energy efficiency by transmitting the collected data to the cluster head for sending finally to the sink. Nevertheless, due to radio channels used on clusters, interference and collision of frequency can occur between neighboring clusters. The channel collision increases energy consumption due to waste of communications. The occurring of frequency interference and channel collisions among neighbor clusters can be resolved by assigning non-overlapping channels among neighbor clusters. In this study, a channel allocation algorithm based on the four-channels is proposed. It allocates exclusive channels among neighbor clusters those implicate various polygonal shapes. Allocating channels in complicate clustering topologies, a local hole which is surrounded by four different channels can be appeared. To solve this local problem, an algorithm which has main and local parts is proposed. The proposed algorithm is applied to a complicate network. The result of experiment shows that the proposed method assigns successfully exclusive channels among neighbors using only four-channels in sensor networks.