Simple interference detection and classification for industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are increasingly deployed in office blocks, residential areas and also industrial locations, thanks to advantages in terms of flexibility and scalability. Nowadays available wireless fieldbuses are widely adopted for process monitoring and offer performance comparable with the wired counterparts, despite they still are more sensitive to interference from external sources. This work investigates the main sources of interference in the 2.4 GHz ISMband and evaluates the adoption of a simple algorithm to identify the interference. The proposed technique, called LPED, is based on bit error nature and forward error correction. The required computational effort is compatible with resources normally available in WSN nodes, as experimentally verified. In addition, performance in presence of IEEE802.11 and iWLAN is also verified; classification is correct in about 90% of cases.