Towards accurate and agile link quality estimation in wireless sensor networks

Link quality estimation has been an important research topic in the wireless sensor networking community and researchers have developed a large number of different methods to estimate link quality. The commonly used CC2420 radio provides simple signal quality indicators. These are agile in that they react fast to changing link quality but they are inaccurate under complicated channel conditions. More sophisticated link quality estimators combine these simple metrics with packet reception statistics collected by the network stack. These approaches compensate the hardware-based metrics to a limited degree but they compromise agility and incur extra overhead. In this paper, we take a novel approach and develop a number of link quality metrics using a software defined radio. We evaluate our metrics under several channel conditions. The results show that they have good accuracy and can handle complicated channel conditions if combined properly.