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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
The hidden-node problem has been shown to be a major source of Quality-of-Service (QoS) degradation in Wireless Sensor
Networks (WSNs) due to factors such as the limited communication range of sensor nodes, link asymmetry and the characteristics
of the physical environment. In wireless contention-based Medium Access Control protocols, if two nodes that are not visible to
each other transmit to a third node that is visible to the formers, there will be a collision – usually called hidden-node or blind
collision. This problem greatly affects network throughput, energy-efficiency and message transfer delays, which might be
particularly dramatic in large-scale WSNs. This technical report tackles the hidden-node problem in WSNs and proposes HNAMe,
a simple yet efficient distributed mechanism to overcome it. H-NAMe relies on a grouping strategy that splits each cluster
of a WSN into disjoint groups of non-hidden nodes and then scales to multiple clusters via a cluster grouping strategy that
guarantees no transmission interference between overlapping clusters. We also show that the H-NAMe mechanism can be easily
applied to the IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee protocols with only minor add-ons and ensuring backward compatibility with the standard
specifications. We demonstrate the feasibility of H-NAMe via an experimental test-bed, showing that it increases network
throughput and transmission success probability up to twice the values obtained without H-NAMe. We believe that the results in
this technical report will be quite useful in efficiently enabling IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee as a WSN protocol.