An empirical study of link quality assessment in wireless sensor networks applicable to transmission power control protocols

Abstract

Transmission Power Control (TPC) protocols are poised for wide spread adoption in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) to address energy constraints. Identifying the optimum transmission power is a significant challenge due to the complex and dynamic nature of the wireless transmission medium and this has resulted in several previous TPC protocols reporting poor reliability and energy efficiency in certain scenarios. In line with current studies, this study presents an empirical characterisation of the transmission medium in typical WSN environments. Through this, the sources of link quality degradation are identified and extensive empirical evidence of their effects are presented. The results highlight that low power wireless links are significantly affected by spatio-temporal factors with the severity of these factors being heavily dependent on environment.

Distributed Symbolic Network Quality Assessment for Resource-constrained Devices

“…WSNs typically use low-powered radios, whose signal quality is highly susceptible to external environmental variables that can change over time [2]. The quality of radio links can be subject to fluctuations [3] and may exhibit characteristics that differ from the ones observed during pre-deployment testing [4].…”