DynaChanAl: Dynamic Channel Allocation with Minimal End-to-end Delay for Wireless Sensor Networks

With recent advances in wireless communication, networking, and low power sensor technology, wireless sensor network (WSN) systems have begun to take significant roles in various applications ranging from environmental sensing to mobile healthcare sensing. While some WSN applications only require a limited amount of bandwidth, new emerging applications operate with a noticeably large amount of data transfers. One way to deal with such applications is to maximize the available capacity by utilizing the use of multiple wireless channels. This work proposes DynaChannAl, a distributed dynamic wireless channel algorithm with the goal of effectively distributing nodes on multiple wireless channels in WSN systems. Specifically, DynaChannAl targets applications where mobile nodes connect to a pre-existing wireless backbone and takes the expected end-to-end queuing delay as its core metric. We use the link quality indicator (LQI) values provided by IEEE 802.15.4 radios white-list potential links with good link quality and evaluate such links with the aggregated packet transmission latency at each hop. Our approach is useful for applications that require minimal end-to-end delay (i.e., healthcare applications). DynaChannAl is a light weight and highly adoptable scheme that can be easily incorporated with various pre-developed components and pre-deployed applications. We evaluate DynaChannAl in on a 45 node WSN testbed. As the first study to consider end-to-end latency as the core metric for channel allocation in WSN systems, the experimental results indicate that DynaChannAl successfully distributes multiple (mobile) source nodes on different wireless channels and enables the nodes to select wireless channel and links that can minimize the end-to-end latency.