Poster Abstract: Burstiness and Scaling in the Structure of Low-Power Wireless Links

The authors observe that low-power wireless links have non-trivial time-scaling characteristics at both the physical- and link-layers. Packet Reception Rate (PRR) analysis shows that links are bursty rather than constant, i.e., their reception quality varies greatly from the overall packet reception rate at different times. Furthermore, this variation is seen at many timescales. They provide a possible explanation for burstiness using wavelet analysis of RSSI traces from a variety of wireless links. They show that these traces can be considered as consistent with statistical self-similarity but not with long range dependence. Using the variance in RSSI, they suggest a way to easily characterize when scaling occurs.