HOPSCOTCH: An adaptive and distributed channel hopping technique for interference avoidance in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Interference is one of the key factors impacting the performance and robustness of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) operation. For serious WSN applications, it is crucial that interference mitigation acts in a fast and reliable fashion. We describe an adaptive and distributed channel hopping scheme, HOPSCOTCH1. Our scheme is novel in the sense that (1) it is built on a lightweight yet accurate metric to describe the interference, and (2) it is fully distributed in nature and combines a proactive, consent-based as well as a reactive, rendezvous-based hopping technique, which allow for robust operation even in adverse conditions. We show by extensive experimentation that our channel metric models real-world conditions accurately and that HOPSCOTCH provides a very fast response time to adapt the network to interference.