Using Reconfigurable Radios to Increase Throughput in Wireless Sensor Networks

In traditional wireless sensor networks communicating on a single channel the data throughput measured at the sink is constrained by the radio capability, contentions, and collisions, which increase in the region closer to the sink. Using SDR technology, different levels of configuration within a transceiver are allowed. In this paper we assume that the sink and sensor nodes are equipped with reconfigurable radios. We design a distributed algorithm used by sensor nodes to reconfigure their radio according to some predefined radio-modes, such that the resulting topology is connected to the sink. Collecting sensor data using this topology reduces the interference and increases the network throughput and the data delivery rate. We analyze the performance of our algorithm using ns-3 simulations.