FWB: Funneling Wider Bandwidth algorithm for high performance data collection in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Many Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) applications demand to collect large volumes of data in a coordinated approach. To do this, a many-to-one pattern (convergecast) communication in tree-based WSN is used, but traffic near the sink node commonly becomes the network bottleneck. Thus, we propose an extension to a wireless network standard to provide wider bandwidth channels. We explore how fast the information can be collected in a WSN organized as a tree, with the radios operating with these wider bandwidth channels. As consequence, we proposed and implemented Funneling Wider Bandwidth (FWB), an algorithm that minimizes schedule length in networks with radios operating with the proposed extension. We proved that the algorithm is optimal in calculating a minimum number of time slots. In this way, we obtain a higher average throughput and a lesser number of time slots. Results from simulations and experiments on a real testbed confirm these gains. The proposed approach could be adapted and used with other related standards such as WirelessHARTTM, ISA 100.11a and IEEE 802.15.4e TSCH. Experiment results showed that with this wider bandwidth emulated in a given topology, the packets received per second by the sink node increased by 122.8% in comparison with just one bandwidth.