Dynamic Channel Assignment for Wireless Sensor Networks: A Regret Matching Based Approach

Multiple channels in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are often exploited to support parallel transmission and to reduce interference. However, the extra overhead posed by the multi-channel usage coordination dramatically challenges the energy-constrained WSNs. In this paper, we propose a Regret Matching based Channel Assignment algorithm (RMCA) to address this challenge, in which each sensor node updates its choice of channels according to the historical record of these channels' performance to reduce interference. The advantage of RMCA is that it is highly distributed and requires very limited information exchange among sensor nodes. It is proved that RMCA converges almost surely to the set of correlated equilibrium. Moreover, RMCA can adapt the channel assignment among sensor nodes to the time-variant flows and network topology. Simulations show that RMCA achieves better network performance in terms of both delivery ratio and packet latency than CONTROL [1], MMSN [2] and randomized CSMA. In addition, real hardware experiments are conducted to demonstrate that RMCA is easy to be implemented and performs better.