Transmission power control for wireless home and building automation

Home and building automation can provide significant improvements in comfort and energy efficiency of buildings. However, its diffusion is hindered by the complexity of installation and maintenance. Wireless connectivity can simplify this process, reducing installation time and cost, but it requires careful design to ensure reliability. One of the key aspects in network operation is bandwidth management. A large number of devices trying to access the medium can result in contention, and the consequent throughput degradation. Several solutions have been studied to this issue, and one of them is Transmission Power Control (TPC). It consists in adjusting the transmission power according to the quality of each link, thereby increasing spatial reuse and increasing energy efficiency. In this work, TPC is proposed as a way to improve the throughput and mitigate contention in wireless home and automation networks, especially those with heavy channel utilization. In the first part of the manuscript, different TPC algorithms in literature are analysed and compared; one of them, ART, is chosen and implemented on JN516x nodes; its performance is evaluated using a set of experiments. The experiments on transmission power and interference demonstrate that lowering the transmission power can improve the throughput reducing the interference between independent nodes, while preserving connectivity in the network. As future work, to improve the current TPC, the use of intelligence and adaptability can increase the performance and stability of the algorithm.