Title: Minimising the effect of WiFi interference in 802.15.4 wireless sensor networks

Authors: Razvan Musaloiu-E., Andreas Terzis

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA. ' Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA

Abstract: Interference from colocated networks operating over the same frequency range, becomes an increasingly severe problem as the number of networks overlapping geographically increases. Our experiments show that such interference is indeed a major problem, causing up to 58% packet loss to a multihop 802.15.4 sensor network competing for radio spectrum with a WiFi network. We present interference estimators that can be efficiently implemented on resource constrained motes using off-the-shelf radios and outline distributed algorithms that use these estimators to dynamically switch frequencies as interference is detected. Lastly, we evaluate the proposed algorithms in the context of a real-life application that downloads large amounts of data over multihop network paths. Our results show that the proposed approach successfully detects interference from competing WiFi channels and selects non-overlapping 802.15.4 channels. As a result, the proposed solution reduces end-to-end loss rate from 22%–58% to < 1%.

Keywords: wireless sensor networks; radio interference; 802.15.4 WSNs; WiFi interference; wireless networks; colocated networks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2008.016461

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2008 Vol.3 No.1, pp.43 - 54

Published online: 30 Dec 2007 *

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