Reliable channel allocation for mission oriented low-power wireless networks

Multichannel communication is widely adopted to improve the reliability of low power wireless networks (LPWNs). For mission oriented LPWNs, data transmissions are often required to be delivered before a given deadline, thus making deadline-driven channel allocation an essential task. The existing works on multichannel allocation often fail to establish channel schedules that can meet the deadline requirement, because they often assume the transmission can success within one transmission slot. Besides, the impact of allocation orders for different paths and channels is also overlooked. In this paper, we propose a Retransmission enabled Deadline-driven Channel Allocation scheme for mission oriented LPWNs (ReDCA). Compared to the existing works, 1) we propose a novel prioritized channel allocation scheme for different paths and channels, which jointly considers deadline requirement, link quality and network topology; 2) we enable retransmissions within the same transmission cycle and assign additional channel/slot pairs to lossy links for possible retransmissions. We conduct both simulation and testbed experiments. The results show that ReDCA can significantly improve the packet delivery ratio before deadline without incurring extra energy consumption compared to the existing works.