Title: Channel assessment for plant-floor wireless sensors operating in unlicensed band

Authors: B. Seetha Ramanjaneyulu, E. Gopinathan

Addresses: DOEACC Centre, Calicut, India ' Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Calicut, India

Abstract: Interference among different wireless devices operating in the same frequency band in a given region is always a problem. The prominent type of it is the interference between Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) and Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) devices operating in the 2.4-GHz unlicensed band. Various techniques such as Adaptive Frequency Hopping (AFH) were proposed recently to deal with this interference. When wireless devices are deployed on plant-floors, the approach required to mitigate the interference can be slightly different so that the proposed techniques should be able to support data prioritisation in addition to managing the interference. This will allow the important data through even if the interference levels are higher than expected. For this to take place, channel assessment should be done first, to find out which channels are suffering interference, to what levels and how often. This aspect of channel assessment is considered here, for different combinations of interferers and power levels.

Keywords: wireless sensors; device-level networks; automation networks; Bluetooth sensors; interference mitigation; channel classification; wireless personal area networks; plant-floor networking; industrial automation; data prioritisation; wireless networks; sensor networks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2006.009392

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2006 Vol.25 No.4, pp.192 - 197

Published online: 28 Mar 2006 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article