Exploiting Multi-Channel Diversity to Speed Up Over-the-Air Programming of Wireless Sensor Networks - 10/07/2005

Weiyao Xiao

Wireless Sensor Networks consist of hundreds or thousands of ad-hoc tiny sensor nodes (motes) that are able to sense, compute, and communicate. Because of the large scale of sensor networks, programming them manually is a tedious and, sometimes, even impossible task. Thus, it is essential to have the capability to program them wirelessly.

In this talk, I will first introduce one of the popular over-air-programming protocols, that is, Deluge, and point out the current issues for most of the protocols. Next, I will talk about how to speed-up over-the-air programming by harnessing the multi-channel transceiving capability of motes. For instance, in the 902-928 MHz frequency region, there are as many as 25 non-overlapping channels (frequencies) over which motes can communicate. The idea, therefore, is to relieve network congestion by splitting the traffic among different channels. We developed a general, dynamic method for exploiting multi-channel resources with single radio nodes. Initial experimental results of Multi-Channel Deluge, which is original Deluge embedded with our idea, show that Multi-Channel Deluge can reduce the programming time by as much as 60% compared to the standard implementation of Deluge.