Classification of Transmission Events Based on Receive Power Pattern with Self-Tuning Thresholds in Wireless Receivers

A transmission failure is caused by either signal attenuation, interference or both in wireless networks. Identification of such cause helps understanding of the current status of a wireless channel and network, thus providing essential information for optimizing the behavior of each network node as well as the operation of the whole network. In this paper, we propose a scheme to classify transmission failures in the receiver side (thus necessitating no change of existing protocols); the scheme detects an anomaly of the receive power pattern observed during an interference period and classify transmission events with the aid of a modem’s decoding result. The feasibility of the scheme is shown via a real experiment with its SDR implementation based on IEEE 802.15.4 ZigBee.