ARCH: Practical Channel Hopping for Reliable Home-Area Sensor Networks

Abstract—Home area networks (HANs) promise to enable sophisticated home automation applications such as smart energy usage and assisted living. However, recent empirical study of HAN reliability in real-world residential environments revealed significant challenges to achieving reliable performance in the face of significant and variable interference from a multitude of coexisting wireless devices. We propose the Adaptive and Robust Channel Hopping (ARCH) protocol: a lightweight receiver-oriented protocol which handles the dynamics of residential environments by reactively channel hopping when channel conditions have degraded. ARCH has several key features. First, ARCH is an adaptive protocol that channelhops based on changes in channel quality observed in real time. Second, ARCH is a distributed protocol that selects channels on a per-link basis, due to the large link-to-link variations in channel quality observed under empirical study. Third, ARCH is designed to be robust and lig...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: RTAS
• Authors: Mo Sha, Gregory Hackmann, Chenyang Lu
• Keywords: Embedded Systems, Home Automation Applications, Residential Environments, RTAS 2011, Third Arch