Low-Power Listening Goes Multi-channel

Abstract

Exploiting multiple radio channels for communication has been long known as a practical way to mitigate interference in wireless settings. In Wireless Sensor Networks, however, multi-channel solutions have not reached their full potential: the MAC layers included in TinyOS or the Contiki OS for example are mostly single-channel. The literature offers a number of interesting solutions, but experimental results were often too few to build confidence. We propose a practical extension of low-power listening, MiCMAC, that performs channel hopping, operates in a distributed way, and is independent of upper layers of the protocol stack. The above properties make it easy to deploy in a variety of scenarios, without any extra configuration/scheduling/channel selection hassle. We implement our solution in Contiki and evaluate it in a 97-node~testbed while running a complete, out-of-the-box low-power IPv6 communication stack (UDP/RPL/6LoWPAN). Our experimental results demonstrate increased resilience to emulated WiFi interference (e.g., data yield kept above 90% when Contiki MAC drops in the 40% range). In noiseless environments, MiCMAC keeps the overhead low in comparison to Contiki MAC, achieving performance as high as 99% data yield along with sub-percent duty cycle and sub-second latency for a 1-minute inter-packet interval data collection.