Adaptive Link Quality Estimation in Wireless Sensor Networks

In the wireless sensor networks using a multi-hop, quality variation of links occurs irregularly due to the hardware restriction and environmental factor. If an appropriate route, which is affected by the quality variation, is not selected. Traditionally, a beacon is periodically broadcasted and the link quality is estimated. However, the periodically beacon based scheme cannot efficiently estimate the quality of the link changing irregularly. In this paper, a scheme to estimate the link quality adaptively according to network state is proposed. When the link quality changes, the scheme adapts to a change agilely and packet losses are reduced. When there is no change of the link quality, the link quality is estimated in the long period and the energy consumption is reduced. Through performance evaluations, we prove that our adaptive link estimation scheme improves the energy efficiency and packet reception ratio than the periodic estimation scheme.