Abstract
In recent years, a significant number of sensor node prototypes have been designed that provide communications in multiple channels. This multi-channel feature can be effectively exploited to increase the overall capacity and performance of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, we present a multi-channel communications system for WSNs that is referred to as load-adaptive practical multi-channel communications (LPMC). LPMC estimates the active load of a channel at the sink since it has a more comprehensive view of the network behavior, and dynamically adds or removes channels based on the estimated load. LPMC updates the routing path to balance the loads of the channels. The nodes in a path use the same channel; therefore, they do not need to switch channels to receive or forward packets. LPMC has been evaluated through extensive simulations, and the results demonstrate that it can effectively increase the delivery ratio, network throughput, and channel utilization, and that it can decrease the end-to-end delay and energy consumption.
Highlights
A wireless sensor network consists of battery-powered sensing devices that transmit their observations to the base station
load-adaptive practical multi-channel communications (LPMC) dynamically adds or removes channels based on the active network load, and uses multiple channels whenever and wherever it is necessary
The main contributions of this paper can be summarized as follows: (i) We propose a multi-channel communication systems for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that keeps the protocol functionalities out of the sensor nodes as much as possible. (ii) LPMC dynamically identifies the network load and adds channel(s) to the mostly heavily loaded part
Summary
A wireless sensor network consists of battery-powered sensing devices that transmit their observations to the base station. To improve the network capacity, many multi-channel medium access control (MAC) protocols have been proposed These protocols generally assign (as part of the network setup) orthogonal channels to the nodes (either to the senders or the receivers) in a two-hop neighborhood [7,8,9]. To minimize the channel switching and to use multiple channels when necessary, a recent paper proposes a dynamic channel allocation policy based on control theory (hereafter referred to as DM-MAC) [10]. We design a multi-channel communications system for WSNs. LPMC dynamically adds or removes channels based on the active network load, and uses multiple channels whenever (when the network load is higher than the capacity) and wherever (the part of the network with a high load) it is necessary.
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