Ultra-Low Power Wireless Sensor Networks Based on Time Slotted Channel Hopping with Probabilistic Blacklisting

Devices in wireless sensor networks are typically powered by batteries, which must last as long as possible to reduce both the total cost of ownership and potentially pollutant wastes when disposed of. By lowering the duty cycle to the bare minimum, time slotted channel hopping manages to achieve very low power consumption, which makes it a very interesting option for saving energy, e.g., at the perception layer of the Internet of Things. In this paper, a mechanism based on probabilistic blacklisting is proposed for such networks, which permits to lower power consumption further. In particular, channels suffering from non-negligible disturbance may be skipped based on the perceived quality of communication so as to increase reliability and decrease the likelihood that retransmissions have to be performed. The only downside of this approach is that the transmission latency may grow, but this is mostly irrelevant for systems where the sampling rates are low enough.