RadiaLE

Link reliability is an important metric for WSN but the nature of RF propagation and the congestion of ISM bands makes link stability a hard guess. However, the flexibility and economy that low-power wireless networks promise are bringing increasing efforts in the community and the industry to better grasp the effects of path loss and the interference situation in the wireless link.

In challenging environments, the required link budget necessary to maintain a given Packet Error Rate (PER) can be quite significant, which is not compatible with the constrains introduced by inexpensive radio architectures and low-power requirements which define WSNs. Therefore, the ultimate goal would be to avoid interference from other networks, overcome small scale fading, etc.

Link Quality Estimators (LQE) could help better understand the impact of these factors and contribute a building block toward reliable WSN that could satisfy time critical and reliability demanding applications.

RadiaLE, recently presented at EWSN 2010, is an open benchmarking testbed that allows performance evaluation of Link Quality Estimators (LQEs).

More info: http://www.open-lqe.net/index.php