SAS: Self-Adaptive Spectrum Management for Wireless Sensor Networks

Smart wireless sensor devices are becoming increasingly ubiquitous and are expected to be embedded in everyday objects in the near future. When these devices are deployed in overlapping or adjacent geographic areas, the unlicensed 2.4 GHz ISM band will be crowded. To deal with the crowded spectrum, we propose SAS, a self-adaptive spectrum management middleware for wireless sensor networks. SAS enables single-frequency MAC protocols with multi-frequency capability, so that an existing MAC protocol, like B-MAC, can automatically adapt to the least congested physical channel at runtime. We implemented SAS in TinyOS 2.1 with nesC and evaluated its performance with TelosB motes. Our performance results demonstrate that SAS improves the performance of existing single-frequency MAC protocols, like B-MAC. The use of SAS results in higher packet reception ratio and system throughput, and a lower packet delay and energy consumption.