Reducing hops without extra power: Impact of deployment height on low-power multihop wireless network

Hoon Jeong,Changwon Lee,Jeongyeup Paek,Byung-Chul Choi,Jaehong Ryu,Jeonggil Ko

doi:10.1177/1550147717732444

Abstract

Many low-power wireless network system deployments are planned on a two-dimensional plane, while in reality, we live in a three-dimensional space. Therefore, although it is essential to well consider the impact of height on the overall wireless system performance, this aspect has often been overlooked if not neglected with simplifying assumptions. Our work takes an empirical effort in quantifying the impact of height on a low-power wireless system’s performance. Specifically, we use CC2420 radio–based wireless sensor network motes to quantify the impact of device deployment height on the connectivity and energy efficiency of low-power wireless networks. In addition, to validate the newly proposed sub-GHz low-power radios, we also experiment on the performance of CC1200 narrowband low-power radios to show that increasing a small amount of height in the node deployment phase can lead to drastic improvements in radio coverage and packet delivery performance. Such an observation can naturally lead to the reduction of network depth in a multihop wireless network for a given target deployment field; thus, it can potentially improve the energy efficiency of the overall system by suppressing the number of packet relay transmissions. We support our findings and observations through experiments on real embedded devices.

Highlights

Introduction and backgroundLow-power and lossy wireless networks (LLNs) composed of thousands of low-power networking devices can be used in a variety of applications including smart grid automated metering infrastructures (AMIs),[1] industrial monitoring,[2] and wireless sensor networks (WSNs).[3,4] Low-power radios used in these networks are widely known to provide very limited coverage for a single-transmission hop in order to consume minimal energy on battery-operated devices, as well as due to regulation reasons
This article raises a concern to this paradigm and asks the question, ‘‘With the recent active development in low-power radios, can we improve the performance of the LLN by reducing the number of hops for low-power networks?’’ Reducing hops in low-power networks can improve latency and throughput, but can help reduce the energy consumed for packet relaying in multihop networks: something that is unavoidable, but crucial for low-power wireless nodes
We present the main contribution of this work, which includes the quantification of low-power network performance for different deployment heights in section ‘‘Experimental validation.’’ we summarize our work in section ‘‘Conclusion.’’

Summary

Introduction

Introduction and backgroundLow-power and lossy wireless networks (LLNs) composed of thousands of low-power networking devices can be used in a variety of applications including smart grid automated metering infrastructures (AMIs),[1] industrial monitoring,[2] and wireless sensor networks (WSNs).[3,4] Low-power radios used in these networks are widely known to provide very limited coverage for a single-transmission hop in order to consume minimal energy on (typically) battery-operated devices, as well as due to regulation reasons. Keywords Low-power and lossy network, wireless sensor network, multihop, deployment height, transmission range, RPL routing protocol, sub-GHz low-power radio

Results

Conclusion