Light Gradient Boosting Machine-Based Link Quality Prediction for Wireless Sensor Networks

Link quality prediction is a fundamental component of the wireless network protocols and is essential for routing protocols in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Effective link quality prediction can select high-quality links for communication and improve the reliability of data transmission. In order to improve the accuracy of the link quality prediction model and reduce the model complexity, the link quality prediction model based on the light gradient boosting machine (LightGBM-LQP) is proposed in this paper. Specifically, agglomerative hierarchical clustering and manual division are combined to grade the link quality and obtain the labels of samples. Then, light gradient boosting machine (LightGBM) classification algorithm and Focal Loss are used to estimate the link quality grades. In order to reduce the impact of data imbalance, Borderline-SMOTE is employed to oversample the minority link quality samples. Finally, LightGBM-LQP predicts link quality grade at the next moment with historical link quality information. The experimental results on data collected from a real-world WSNs show that the proposed model has better prediction accuracy and shorter predicting time compared to related models.