Transmission power control for wireless home and building automation

Home and building automation can provide significant improvements in comfort and energy efficiency of buildings. However, its diffusion is hindered by the complexity of installation and maintenance. Wireless connectivity can simplify this process, reducing installation time and cost, but it requires careful design to ensure reliability. One of the key aspects in network operation is bandwidth management. A large number of devices trying to access the medium can result in contention, and the consequent throughput degradation. Several solutions have been studied to this issue, and one of them is Transmission Power Control (TPC). It consists in adjusting the transmission power according to the quality of each link, thereby increasing spatial reuse and increasing energy efficiency. In this work, TPC is proposed as a way to improve the throughput and mitigate contention in wireless home and automation networks, especially those with heavy channel utilization. In the first part of the manuscript, different TPC algorithms in literature are analysed and compared; one of them, ART, is chosen and implemented on JN516x nodes; its performance is evaluated using a set of experiments. The experiments on transmission power and interference demonstrate that lowering the transmission power can improve the throughput reducing the interference between independent nodes, while preserving connectivity in the network. As future work, to improve the current TPC, the use of intelligence and adaptability can increase the performance and stability of the algorithm

Interference mitigation through adaptive power control in wireless sensor networks

\u3cp\u3eAdaptive transmission power control schemes have been introduced in wireless sensor networks to adjust energy consumption under different network conditions. This is a crucial goal, given the constraints under which sensor communications operate. Power reduction may however have counter-productive effects to network performance. Yet, indiscriminate power boosting may detrimentally affect interference. We are interested in understanding the conditions under which coordinated power reduction may lead to better spectrum efficiency, interference mitigation and, thus, have beneficial effects on network performance. Through a combination of measurements and simulations, we study the relation between transmission power and communication efficiency with the technique of Adaptive and Robust Topology control (ART), showing how power reduction can benefit energy and spectrum efficiency. We identify critical limitations in ART (in terms of stability and adaptivity), discussing the potential of more cooperative power-control approaches.\u3c/p\u3