Concurrent Wireless Channel Survey on Dual Band Sensor Network Testbed

Researchers have proposed many multi-channel and dual-band communication systems to address the limitations of single-channel hardware and software. The most common dual-band communication for sensor network applications use 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz radios. There are now some testbeds such as Flocklab and Twonet that allow experimentation with dual-radio systems. However, there is no widely accepted efficient and comprehensive mechanism to survey all the channels of the dual band systems during networking experiments. In this work, we evaluate two mechanisms that can survey the RF environment in multiple channels in both the bands concurrently. We implement these two mechanisms on Twonet and evaluate them. We find that the channel scanning methodology is generally sound but sometimes static channel assignment may be attractive due to its simplicity.