Joint routing, channel allocation and power control for real‐life wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Abstract The energy consumption of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a critical issue, because replacement of their batteries can be difficult or even impossible. It is well known that the radio is the most energy demanding part of the node. Therefore, efficient communications are imperative to increase the network lifetime. However, many issues arise in practical WSNs implementations because of the uncertainty and dynamics of the environment and the complexity constraints of the nodes. Routing protocol for low‐power and lossy networks (RPL) is one of the most widely implemented routing strategies because it deals with many of these practical issues. Unfortunately, this protocol does not adapt the nodes' transmission power nor the nodes' transmission channel. Nowadays, commercial motes have multi‐power and multi‐channel capabilities, and these can be used to reduce the network consumption and avoid the high collision probability that may arise in convergecast networks. In this paper, we enhance RPL to obtain a joint routing, transmission power control and channel allocation solution for real‐life WSNs. Two different strategies (minimum aggregated power and maximum probability delivery ratio) are designed and implemented in a WSN testbed with commercial motes. They are compared with the original RPL and also with other standard routing protocols, such as the routing strategy adopted in ZigBee. The experimental results show that the network performance is improved both in terms of reliability and energy consumption. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.