Tree-based channel assignment schemes for multi-channel wireless sensor networks

Many sensor node platforms used for establishing wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can support multiple radio channels for wireless communication. Therefore, rather than using a single radio channel for whole network, multiple channels can be utilized in a sensor network simultaneously to decrease overall network interference, which may help increase the aggregate network throughput and decrease packet collisions and delays. This method, however, requires appropriate schemes to be used for assigning channels to nodes for multi-channel communication in the network. Because data generated by sensor nodes are usually delivered to the sink node using routing trees, a tree-based channel assignment scheme is a natural approach for assigning channels in a WSN. We present two fast tree-based channel assignment schemes (called bottom up channel assignment and neighbor count-based channel assignment) for multi-channel WSNs. We also propose a new interference metric that is used by our algorithms in making decisions. We validated and evaluated our proposed schemes via extensive simulation experiments. Our simulation results show that our algorithms can decrease interference in a network, thereby increasing performance, and that our algorithms are good alternatives for static channel assignment in WSNs. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.