Adaptive CCA for IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Sensor Networks to Mitigate Interference

IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) share the 2.4 GHz Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) license-free band with many other wireless technologies such as IEEE 802.11b/g Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). Because of the low-power, however, IEEE 802.15.4 WSNs are potentially vulnerable to the interference introduced by the other wireless technologies such as IEEE 802.11b/g WLANs, which have much higher power. Particularly, in the presence of heavy interference, IEEE 802.15.4 nodes can hardly get a chance to access the channel, which could result in discarding a large amount of packets. In this paper, we propose a decentralized approach to help IEEE 802.15.4 nodes mitigate interference. By adaptively and distributively adjusting Clear Channel Assessment (CCA) thresholds of IEEE 802.15.4 nodes in the presence of heavy interference, the approach can substantially reduce the amount of discarded packets due to channel access failures, and therefore significantly enhance the performance of IEEE 802.15.4 WSNs. The approach is robust, responsive and easy to be implemented at a low cost. The effectiveness of the approach is validated by OPNET simulation

Adaptive parameters adjustment in WBAN to mitigate Wi-Fi interferences

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN), called also Wireless Body Sensor Network (WBSN), is composed of a set of tiny wireless devices (sensors) attached, implanted or ingested into the body. It offers real time and ubiquitous applications thanks to the small form, the lightness, and the wireless interface of sensors. WBAN performance is expected to be considerably degraded in the presence of Wi-Fi networks. Their operating channels overlap in the 2.4 GHz Industrial Scientific and Medical (ISM) band which produces interference when they transmit data, accompanied by data losses and quick battery exhaustion. Therefore, it is crucial to mitigate the interference between WBAN and Wi-Fi networks in order to maintain the efficiency and the reliability of the WBAN system. Proposals in the literature use an added complex hardware in WBAN system, or perform the exchange of additional information, or establish expensive communications, or affect the quality of service of the WBAN. Unlike previous researches, we proposed simple, low cost and dynamic method that adaptively adjusts specific parameters in the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer. We have proved the effectiveness of our approach based on theoretical analysis and simulation using MiXiM framework of OMNet++ simulato

Mitigating Radio Interference in Large IoT Networks through Dynamic CCA Adjustment

The performance of low-power wireless sensor networks used to build Internet of Things applications often suffers from radio interference generated by co-located wireless devices or from jammers maliciously placed in their proximity. As IoT devices typically operate in unsupervised large-scale installations, and as radio interference is typically localized and hence affects only a portion of the nodes in the network, it is important to give low-power wireless sensors and actuators the ability to autonomously mitigate the impact of surrounding interference. In this paper we present our approach DynCCA, which dynamically adapts the clear channel assessment threshold of IoT devices to minimize the impact of malicious or unintentional interference on both network reliability and energy efficiency. First, we describe how varying the clear channel assessment threshold at run-time using only information computed locally can help to minimize the impact of unintentional interference from surrounding devices and to escape jamming attacks. We then present the design and implementation of DynCCA on top of ContikiMAC and evaluate its performance on wireless sensor nodes equipped with IEEE 802.15.4 radios. Our experimental investigation shows that the use of DynCCA in dense IoT networks can increase the packet reception rate by up to 50% and reduce the energy consumption by a factor of 4

A survey of IEEE 802.15.4 effective system parameters for wireless body sensor networks

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Moravejosharieh, Amirhossein, Lloret, Jaime. (2016). A survey of IEEE 802.15.4 effective system parameters for wireless body sensor networks.International Journal of Communication Systems, 29, 7, 1269-1292. DOI: 10.1002/dac.3098, which has been published in final form at http://doi.org/10.1002/dac.3098. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving[EN] Wireless body sensor networks are offered to meet the requirements of a diverse set of applications such as health-related and well-being applications. For instance, they are deployed to measure, fetch and collect human body vital signs. Such information could be further used for diagnosis and monitoring of medical conditions. IEEE 802.15.4 is arguably considered as a well-designed standard protocol to address the need for low-rate, low-power and low-cost wireless body sensor networks. Apart from the vast deployment of this technology, there are still some challenges and issues related to the performance of the medium access control (MAC) protocol of this standard that are required to be addressed. This paper comprises two main parts. In the first part, the survey has provided a thorough assessment of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol performance where its functionality is evaluated considering a range of effective system parameters, that is, some of the MAC and application parameters and the impact of mutual interference. The second part of this paper is about conducting a simulation study to determine the influence of varying values of the system parameters on IEEE 802.15.4 performance gains. More specifically, we explore the dependability level of IEEE 802.5.4 performance gains on a candidate set of system parameters. Finally, this paper highlights the tangible needs to conduct more investigations on particular aspect(s) of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Moravejosharieh, A.; Lloret, J. (2016). A survey of IEEE 802.15.4 effective system parameters for wireless body sensor networks. International Journal of Communication Systems. 29(7):1269-1292. https://doi.org/10.1002/dac.3098S12691292297Alrajeh, N. A., Lloret, J., & Canovas, A. (2014). A Framework for Obesity Control Using a Wireless Body Sensor Network. International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 10(7), 534760. doi:10.1155/2014/534760Lopes I Silva B Rodrigues J Lloret J Proenca M A mobile health monitoring solution for weight control International Conference on Wireless Communications and Signal Processing (WCSP) Nanjing / China 2011 1 5Singh, N., Singh, A. K., & Singh, V. K. (2015). Design and performance of wearable ultrawide band textile antenna for medical applications. Microwave and Optical Technology Letters, 57(7), 1553-1557. doi:10.1002/mop.29131Lan, K., Chou, C.-M., Wang, T., & Li, M.-W. (2012). 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Precise Packet Loss Pattern Generation by Intentional Interference

Abstract—Intermediate-quality links often cause vulnerable connectivity in wireless sensor networks, but packet losses caused by such volatile links are not easy to trace. In order to equip link layer protocol designers with a reliable test and debugging tool, we develop a reactive interferer to generate packet loss patterns precisely. By using intentional interference to emulate parameterized lossy links with very low intrusiveness, our tool facilitates both robustness evaluation of protocols and flaw detection in protocol implementation

Wireless Sensor Networking in Challenging Environments

Recent years have witnessed growing interest in deploying wireless sensing applications in real-world environments. For example, home automation systems provide fine-grained metering and control of home appliances in residential settings. Similarly, assisted living applications employ wireless sensors to provide continuous health and wellness monitoring in homes. However, real deployments of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) pose significant challenges due to their low-power radios and uncontrolled ambient environments. Our empirical study in over 15 real-world apartments shows that low-power WSNs based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard are highly susceptible to external interference beyond user control, such as Wi-Fi access points, Bluetooth peripherals, cordless phones, and numerous other devices prevalent in residential environments that share the unlicensed 2.4 GHz ISM band with IEEE 802.15.4 radios. To address these real-world challenges, we developed two practical wireless network protocols including the Adaptive and Robust Channel Hopping (ARCH) protocol and the Adaptive Energy Detection Protocol (AEDP). ARCH enhances network reliability through opportunistically changing radio\u27s frequency to avoid interference and environmental noise and AEDP reduces false wakeups in noisy wireless environments by dynamically adjusting the wakeup threshold of low-power radios. Another major trend in WSNs is the convergence with smart phones. To deal with the dynamic wireless conditions and varying application requirements of mobile users, we developed the Self-Adapting MAC Layer (SAML) to support adaptive communication between smart phones and wireless sensors. SAML dynamically selects and switches Medium Access Control protocols to accommodate changes in ambient conditions and application requirements. Compared with the residential and personal wireless systems, industrial applications pose unique challenges due to their critical demands on reliability and real-time performance. We developed an experimental testbed by realizing key network mechanisms of industrial Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSANs) and conducted an empirical study that revealed the limitations and potential enhancements of those mechanisms. Our study shows that graph routing is more resilient to interference and its backup routes may be heavily used in noisy environments, which demonstrate the necessity of path diversity for reliable WSANs. Our study also suggests that combining channel diversity with retransmission may effectively reduce the burstiness of transmission failures and judicious allocation of multiple transmissions in a shared slot can effectively improve network capacity without significantly impacting reliability

Energy-Efficient Low Power Listening for Wireless Sensor Networks in Noisy Environments

Low Power Listening (LPL) is a common MAC-layer technique for reducing energy consumption in wireless sensor networks, where nodes periodically wake up to sample the wireless channel to detect activity. However, LPL is highly susceptible to false wakeups caused by environmental noise being detected as activity on the channel, causing nodes to spuriously wake up in order to receive nonexistent transmissions. In empirical studies in residential environments, we observe that the false wakeup problem can significantly increase a node\u27s duty cycle, compromising the benefit of LPL. We also find that the energy-level threshold used by the Clear Channel Assessment (CCA) mechanism to detect channel activity has a significant impact on the false wakeup rate. We then design AEDP, an adaptive energy detection protocol for LPL, which dynamically adjust a node\u27s CCA threshold to improve network reliability and duty cycle based on application-specified bounds. Empirical experiments in both controlled tests and real-world environments showed AEDP can effectively mitigate the impact of noise on radio duty cycles, while maintaining satisfactory link reliability