Wireless Channel Assignment in Smart Home

Abstract

The popularization of the Internet of Things (IoT) encouraged a rapid growth in the number of wireless devices. Wireless networks experience serious coexistence problems due to interference caused by devices using the same frequency (mainly, 2.4 GHz). This problem is more serious when the environment has many wireless devices close to each other, such as smart homes. In a smart home, the wireless devices communicate through a Wireless Home Network (WHN). Usually, no suitable strategy is applied to prevent the wireless devices to use the same channel, and, consequently, to reduce the interference in the WHN. Within this context, this paper presents a channel assigner using a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) model, that has the objective to minimize the interference suffered by devices in the WHN. Thus, the proposal aims to mitigate the coexistence problem in a smart home environment. Experiments performed suggested that the proposed channel assigner is capable of reducing the interference in WHN by 50% when compared with the existing approaches.