Sensor Networks and Their Radio Environment : On Testbeds, Interference, and Broken Packets

Sensor networks consist of small sensing devices that collaboratively fulfill a sensing task, such as monitoring the soil in an agricultural field or measuring vital signs in a marathon runner. To avoid cumbersome and expensive cabling, nodes in a sensor network are powered by batteries and communicate wirelessly. As a consequence of the latter, a sensor network's communication is affected by its radio environment, i.e., the environment's propagation characteristics and the presence of other radio devices. This thesis addresses three issues related to the impact of the radio environment on sensor networks. Firstly, in order to draw conclusions from experimental results, it is necessary to assess how the environment and the experiment infrastructure affect the results. We design a sensor network testbed, dubbed Sensei-UU, to be easily relocatable. By performing an experiment in different environments, a researcher can asses the environments’ impact on results. We further augment Sensei-UU with support for mobile nodes. The implemented mobility approach adds only little variance to results, and therefore enables repeatable experiments with mobility. The repeatability of experiments increases the confidence in conclusions drawn from them. Secondly, sensor networks may experience poor communication performance due to cross-technology radio interference, especially in office and residential environments. We consider the problem of detecting and classifying the type of interference a sensor network is exposed to. We find that different sources of interference each leave a characteristic "fingerprint" on individual, corrupt 802.15.4 packets. We design and implement the SoNIC system that enables sensor nodes to classify interference using these fingerprints. SoNIC supports accurate classification in both a controlled and an uncontrolled environment. Finally, we consider transmission errors in an outdoor sensor network. In such an environment, errors occur despite the absence of interference if the signal-to-noise ratio at a receiver is too low. We study the characteristics of corrupt packets collected from an outdoor sensor network deployment. We find that content transformation in corrupt packets follows a specific pattern, and that most corrupt packets contain only few errors. We propose that the pattern may be useful for applications that can operate on inexact data, because it reduces the uncertainty associated with a corrupt packet.WISENE