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Galbreath, Jacob H.

Electrical Engineering

2006

MS

For many wireless sensor networks (WSN), sensor nodes are envisioned to be statically deployed; for example, near the ground or odwithin structural surfaces. While temporal fading for these fixed nodes may not exist, the radio channel may nevertheless experience severe frequency selective fading. This thesis presents several channel allocation strategies for fade mitigation, utilizing in situ fading measurements obtained from node received signal strength data. The strategies take advantage of current frequency agile radio designs and consider both single and multiple frequency allocations along with nodal connectivity requirements. The techniques are demonstrated on real-world data measured for an in-vehicle wireless sensor application. The hardware platform utilized is Microstrain's V-Link wireless sensors along with a Microstrain USB Base Station, both configured for operation in the 902-928 MHz frequency band. The key contributions of the work are twofold. First, the developed strategies are computationally simple and thus can be implemented on existing node microcontrollers. Second, the fading measurement methodology utilizes the sensor nodes themselves to effectively provide distributed scalar, network analyzer functionality. This technique is referred to as wireless sensors, sensing wireless (WSSW).