Distributed Routing and Channel Selection for Multi-Channel Wireless Sensor Networks

We propose a joint channel selection and quality aware routing scheme for multi-channel wireless sensor networks that apply asynchronous duty cycling to conserve energy, which is common in many environmental monitoring applications. Energy resources may vary from node to node due to differential consumption as well as availability, as observed in rechargeable sensor networks. A data collection traffic pattern is assumed, where all sensor nodes periodically forward sensor data to a centralized base station (sink). Under these assumptions, the effect of overhearing dominates the energy consumption of the nodes. The proposed scheme achieves lifetime improvement by reducing the energy consumed in overhearing and also by dynamically balancing the lifetimes of nodes. Performance evaluations are presented from experimental tests as well as from extensive simulation studies, which show that the proposed scheme reduces overhearing by ∼60% with just 2 channels without significantly affecting the network performance.