Level the buffer wall: Fair channel assignment in wireless sensor networks

—In this paper, we study the trade-off between network throughput and fairness in a multi-channel enabled WSN. Traditional approaches attempt to solve the two problems in an isolated manner without a joint design. Our empirical studies show that solutions to these two problems cannot be simply combined. Away from the traditional belief, the number of channels in WSNs with TelosB sensor nodes operating at 2.4GHz band can be up to 83 and the orthogonal channels can be up to 27. The switching overhead in terms of time and energy cost is relatively small. Furthermore, we observe a buffer wall phenomenon which is one of the main reasons causing network throughput degradation and unfairness. To strike a better trade-off between the network throughput and fairness, we design a novel multi-channel assignment algorithm, targeting at maximizing the minimal data sending rate. The key idea of the proposed algorithm is to level down the buffer wall so that the buffer usage of nodes can be evenly ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: COMCOM
• Authors: Yanyan Yang, Yunhuai Liu, Lionel M. Ni
• Keywords: Buffer Wall, Buffer Wall Phenomenon, COMCOM 2008, COMCOM 2010, Multi-channel Enabled Wsn