A Survey of Link Quality Properties Related to Transmission Power Control Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Transmission Power Control (TPC) protocols are poised for wide spread adoption in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to address energy constraints. The link quality properties that need to be captured in order to identify the optimum transmission power (TP) have not been clearly defined and previous works have presented conflicting views on the matter. This has led to several current TPC protocols using vastly different link quality properties and reporting unreliable, unstable and inefficient network performance. In this work, observations from several empirical studies on low-power wireless links are applied to identify the most critical properties of link quality for a TPC protocol. Comparing the requirements against currently available link quality estimators, it is shown that link quality estimation in WSNs is still very much an open challenge and one that must be addressed in order to implement an accurate and reliable TPC protocol.