Interference mitigation in wireless sensor networks using dual heterogeneous radios

Scalability is one of the most important features that future wireless sensor networks (WSNs) should provide, and clustering is widely considered as a viable approach for high scalability. In the cluster-based architecture, the cluster heads play a key role in relaying messages between the sensor nodes and the sink. While the cluster heads are involved in both intra-cluster and inter-cluster communication, the latter typically requires transmission over much longer distance than the former. In this paper, we consider a scenario in which each cluster head is equipped with dual radios: IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11 for intra-cluster and inter-cluster communication, respectively. IEEE 802.11 links between the cluster heads and the sink provide a high capacity backbone for large-scale WSNs. IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11 share a lot of similarities including CSMA/CA MAC. Their operating spectrum also overlaps at the 2.4 GHz ISM band, and this may cause interference. We first experimentally measure how severe the interference can be, when two radios are concurrently used in a WSN. We, then, propose an interference mitigation solution which relies on adaptive aggregation of packets and adaptive transmission scheduling. Through prototyping and experimental evaluation, we show that the proposed scheme significantly reduces the interferences between the two types of radios.