A testbed for the evaluation of link quality estimators in wireless sensor networks

Link quality estimation is a fundamental building block for the design of several different mechanisms and protocols in wireless sensor networks. The accuracy of link quality estimation greatly impacts the efficiency of these protocols. Therefore, a thorough experimental evaluation of link quality estimators (LQEs) is mandatory. This motivated us to build a benchmarking testbed-RadiaLE, that automates LQEs evaluation by analyzing their statistical properties. Our testbed includes (i.) hardware components that represent the WSN under test and (ii.) a software tool for setting up and controlling the experiments and also for analyzing the collected data, allowing for LQEs evaluation. To demonstrate the usefulness of RadiaLE, we carried out a comparative performance study of a set of well-known LQEs.