Channel characterization and throughput tradeoff for wireless sensor networks

With the growing number of wireless network standards operating in the unlicensed frequency band and the military moving toward commercial off the shelf technology, the next generation of wireless sensor networks must be robust against unintentional and hostile interference. One method that has gained interest to cope with the increased spectrum use and to combat the interference vulnerability in wireless sensor networks is frequency agile communication. These techniques typically entail spectrum sensing and dynamic frequency channel allocation. In this paper, the energy detection mechanism is used to investigate how the number of frequency channels characterized for spectrum sensing impacts the accuracy of frequency channel selection and how the number of channels characterized affects the achievable throughput. From the investigation, we observed a tradeoff between the number of channels characterized, the number of energy samples used in energy detection, and the achievable throughput.