Radio Link Quality Estimation in Wireless Sensor Networks: a Survey

Radio link quality estimation in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has a fundamental impact on the net- work performance and affects as well the design of higher layer protocols. Therefore, since about a decade, it has been attracting a vast array of research works. Reported works on link quality estimation are typically based on different assumptions, consider different scenarios, and provide radically different (and sometimes contradictory) results. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on related literature, covering the char- acteristics of low-power links, the fundamental concepts of link quality estimation in WSNs, a taxonomy of existing link quality estimators, and their performance analysis. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey tackling in detail link quality estimation in WSNs. We believe our efforts will serve as a reference to orient researchers and system designers in this area.