We address the problem of generating customized, controlled interference for experimental and testing purposes in Wireless Sensor Networks. The known coexistence problems between electronic devices sharing the same ISM radio band drive the design of new solutions to mitigate interference. The validation of these techniques and the assessment of protocols under external interference require the creation of reproducible and well-controlled interference patterns on real nodes, a nontrivial and time-consuming task. In this paper, we study methods to generate a precisely adjustable level of interference on a specific channel, with lowcost equipment and rapid calibration. We focus our work on the platforms carrying the CC2420 radio chip. We show that, by setting the CC2420 in special mode, we can easily generate repeatable and precise patterns of interference. We show how this method is extremely useful for researchers to quickly investigate the behaviour of sensor network protocols and applications under different patterns of interference. We further evaluate the performance of our proposed method.

Radio interference plays a central role for the performance of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Interference not only leads to packet loss, but it also affects the function of MAC and routing protocols. Hitherto, testing the impact of interference on WSN experimentally has been difficult because of the unavailability of low-cost tools to create reproducible and well-controlled interference patterns. In this demo we present a simple and inexpensive method to generate controllable and repeatable interference patterns for 802.15.4 devices. The demo is presented as a game, where a user is required to achieve a given interference level.