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On link asymmetry and one-way estimation in wireless sensor networks

Published: 02 March 2010 Publication History
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    Link asymmetry is one of the unique challenges that wireless sensor networks pose in the design of network protocols. We observe, based on testbed experiments, that a substantial percentage of links are asymmetric, many are even unidirectional. We also find that the reliability of synchronous acknowledgments is considerably higher than that of asynchronous messages. Thus the norm of estimating link quality bidirectionally via asynchronous beacons underestimates the link reliability of asymmetric links. This leads us to investigate how to exploit asymmetric links in order to improve network functions such as convergecast routing in sensor networks via one-way link estimation. We propose a new one-way link metric ETF (for the expected number of transmissions over forward links) and present a local procedure for its estimation. We use ETF to identify reliable forward links, and we use dynamic retransmission thresholding for error control. Via experiments on testbeds of CC1000 radios and CC2420 radios (an IEEE 802.15.4-compliant radio), we quantify the performance improvement in ETF as compared with ETX. We also study the performance improvement of ETF over ETX when no special mechanism is employed to discover asymmetric links or to control retransmissions.

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      cover image ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks
      ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks  Volume 6, Issue 2
      February 2010
      270 pages
      ISSN:1550-4859
      EISSN:1550-4867
      DOI:10.1145/1689239
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Publication History

      Published: 02 March 2010
      Accepted: 01 June 2009
      Revised: 01 March 2009
      Received: 01 January 2008
      Published in TOSN Volume 6, Issue 2

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      Author Tags

      1. Sensor network
      2. link estimation
      3. routing

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      • (2020)Accurate Graph Filtering in Wireless Sensor NetworksIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2020.3010610(1-1)Online publication date: 2020
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