SmartChannel: A Robust and Energy-Aware Multi-channel Management Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

Multiple Channel Design (MCD) has been adopted widely in wireless networks to increase throughput and reliability with relatively less energy consumption. Due to physical restrictions of sensor nodes, applying multiple radio channels in sensor networks poses significant challenges, particularly on energy consumption. To address such challenges, we propose an energy-aware MCD scheme called SmartChannel. SmartChannel is a fully distributed and self-configurable scheme. Leveraging the hyper graph theory, we model multiple channels shared by different groups of sensor nodes as a hyper graph model. In the SmartChannel scheme, a hyper edge that connects more than two nodes can naturally represent a group of sensor nodes that shares the same radio channel. SmartChannel is composed of constructing, repairing, and routing algorithms: the Backward Binary Tree (BBT) algorithm is proposed to construct a network with minimum system costs, the repairing algorithm is to enable the self-healing mechanism, and the routing algorithm explores most robust routes with least costs. Several important characteristics of the SmartChannel scheme have been rigorously proved. Extensive simulations have been conducted and demonstrated desirable performance of SmartChannel in terms of both routing and energy efficiency, accuracy, and robustness.