The hidden-node problem has been shown to be a major source of Quality-of-Service (QoS) degradation in Wireless SensorNetworks (WSNs) due to factors such as the limited communication range of sensor nodes, link asymmetry and the characteristicsof the physical environment. In wireless contention-based Medium Access Control protocols, if two nodes that are not visible toeach other transmit to a third node that is visible to the formers, there will be a collision – usually called hidden-node or blindcollision. This problem greatly affects network throughput, energy-efficiency and message transfer delays, which might beparticularly dramatic in large-scale WSNs. This technical report tackles the hidden-node problem in WSNs and proposes HNAMe,a simple yet efficient distributed mechanism to overcome it. H-NAMe relies on a grouping strategy that splits each clusterof a WSN into disjoint groups of non-hidden nodes and then scales to multiple clusters via a cluster grouping strategy thatguarantees no transmission interference between overlapping clusters. We also show that the H-NAMe mechanism can be easilyapplied to the IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee protocols with only minor add-ons and ensuring backward compatibility with the standardspecifications. We demonstrate the feasibility of H-NAMe via an experimental test-bed, showing that it increases networkthroughput and transmission success probability up to twice the values obtained without H-NAMe. We believe that the results inthis technical report will be quite useful in efficiently enabling IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee as a WSN protocol.
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