Is local blacklisting relevant in slow channel hopping low-power wireless networks?

With the large growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), a strong focus has been put on designing and developing energy efficient and high performance protocols. Industrial-type wireless networks require strict and on-time delivery guarantees, such as close to 100% network reliability and ultra low delay. To this aim, standards such as IEEE 802.15.4-TSCH or Wireless HART, aim to guarantee high-level network reliability by keeping nodes time-synchronized and by employing a slow channel hopping pattern to combat noisy environments and external interference. In wireless networks, since all the radio channels are not impacted in a similar manner, blacklisting bad channels may improve performance of the whole wireless infrastructure. In this paper, we perform a thorough experimental study to characterize the radio (for all IEEE 802.15.4 channels) and connectivity among the nodes of an indoor testbed. More precisely, we investigate the locality of these blacklisting techniques and we highlighted: the fact that some channels perform poorly only in a small set of locations, for certain radio links. Our study tends to justify the need for local blacklisting techniques, demanding more control packets, but dealing more efficiently with spectral re-use.