IACR: an interference-aware channel reservation for wireless sensor networks

In battery-based wireless sensor networks, energy-efficient operation is one of the most important factors. Especially, in order to improve energy efficiency in wireless sensor networks, various studies on low power operation have been actively conducted in the MAC layer. In recent years, mutual interference among various radio technologies using the same radio frequency band has become a serious problem. Wi-Fi, ZigBee, and Bluetooth use the same frequency band of 2.4GHz at the same time, which causes various signal interference problems. In this paper, we propose a novel channel reservation scheme, called IACR, to improve the energy efficiency of wireless sensor networks in an environment where interference occurs between various wireless technologies. The proposed scheme inserts a PN code into a long preamble for exchanging transmission status information between a transmitting node and a receiving node, thereby improving the transmission success probability while receiving less influence on transmission of other radio technologies. We performed an event-driven simulation and an experiment to measure the signal detection rate. As a result, it can be seen that the proposed technique reduces the packet drop rate by 15% and increases the discoverable distance of the control packet for channel reservation.