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On enabling cooperative communication and diversity combination in IEEE 802.15.4 wireless networks using off-the-shelf sensor motes

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Abstract

This paper presents the ‘Generalized Poor Man’s SIMO System’ (gPMSS) which combines two approaches, cooperative communication and diversity combination, to reduce packet losses over links in wireless sensor networks. The proposed gPMSS is distinct from previous cooperative communication architectures in wireless sensor networks which rely on a relay channel, and also distinct from implementations in 802.11 networks that require a wired infrastructure or hardware changes for cooperation. gPMSS foregoes the need for any changes to mote hardware and it works within the current IEEE 802.15.4 standard. We describe the gPMSS protocol that governs the cooperation between receivers. Three variants are evaluated including selection diversity, equal gain and maximal ratio combining. First, we demonstrate gPMSS on bit error traces in a fully reproducible manner. This is followed by an implementation of gPMSS in C# on the .NET Micro Framework edition of the recently released Imote2 mote platform. We demonstrate by means of experiments an increase in the packet reception rate from 22–30% to 73–76%, a relative increase of 150–245%. We also analyzed the power consumed by the transmitter per delivered packet and observe a reduction of up to 68%. We also take into account the retry limit of the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol and demonstrate that gPMSS is able to provide 99% packet delivery at the protocol’s default retry parameters against 65–75% without it.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by NSF Award CNS-0721550, NSF Award CCF-0728996, NSF Award CCF-0515253, and an unrestricted gift from Microsoft Research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, 48824, USA

    Muhammad U. Ilyas, Moonseong Kim & Hayder Radha

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  1. Muhammad U. Ilyas
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  2. Moonseong Kim
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  3. Hayder Radha
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Correspondence to Muhammad U. Ilyas.

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The preliminary version of this paper titled “Reducing Packet Losses in Networks of Commodity IEEE 802.15.4 Sensor Motes Using Cooperative Communication and Diversity Combination” was published in the proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (Infocom), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Apr. 19–25, 2009.

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Ilyas, M.U., Kim, M. & Radha, H. On enabling cooperative communication and diversity combination in IEEE 802.15.4 wireless networks using off-the-shelf sensor motes. Wireless Netw 17, 1173–1189 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-011-0338-7

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