RadiaLE

Estimating the quality of radio links is of paramount importance in WSNs, namely for designing reliable and energy-efficient WSN protocols/mechanisms (e.g. MAC, routing, mobility management, fault-tolerance, deployment, and topology control). For instance, many routing protocols (e.g. CTP(Collection Tree Protocol)) rely on link quality estimation to select higher quality routes. Therefore, it is important to assess the performance of a link quality estimator (LQE) before selecting and integrating it into a particular network protocol/mechanism.

The open-LQE web site includes the following open-source toolset:

RadiaLE software tool:

RadiaLE is a benchmarking test-bed that enables the performance evaluation of LQEs. It comprises the hardware components of the WSN test-bed (TelosB nodes, USB cables/hubs) and a software tool for setting up and controlling the experiments and also for analyzing the collected data, allowing for LQEs evaluation (more details are given here). While we built up and validated RadiaLE through a test-bed setup in Porto (Portugal), the idea is that anyone can use it in its own location just by downloading and running the following applications:

• Experiment Control Java application. It allows motes programming/control, network configuration and data logging into a MySQL database.
• Data analysis Matlab application. It processes the collected data to provide two main functionalities: links characterization and LQEs perfomence evaluation.

TinyOS implementation of several Link Quality Estimators

RadiaLE has a default set of LQEs already implemented (that can be easily extended with any other LQE), but these LQEs can also be used independently from RadiaLE. Therefore, we provide the nesC/TinyOS code for the following LQEs, as follows (tested with TOSSIM 2):

• Implementation of 5 LQEs, at CTP routing level : 4bit (the default LQE of CTP) ETX, RNP, PRR and WMEWMA.
• Implementation of 6 LQEs, at the Aplication level : F-LQE, 4bit, ETX, RNP, PRR and WMEWMA.