Probe-Based Transmission Power Control for Dependable Wireless Sensor Networks

Dependable Wireless Sensor Networks for industrial process automation, monitoring and control applications have high demands regarding network reliability in terms of timely delivery and packet loss. In large industrial facilities, interference between neighboring networks is a major problem that can be mitigated by reducing the radio transmission power to the necessary minimum. However, reliability of the network should not be compromised even in spite of packet loss bursts. In this paper we aim at keeping the link within certain burstiness bounds while still minimizing the transmission power. We present evaluation results showing that the burstiness changes with the receiver signal strength. Based on this observation we present two mechanisms for dependable wireless sensor networks and study the performance in our testbed.