Experimental Analysis of the Efficiency of Shared Access in IEEE802.15.4-TSCH Networks with Sporadic Traffic

International audienceIndustrial wireless networks are now used in many applications, and require to fulfill a certain set of requirements to operate properly. IEEE802.15.4-TSCH is considered a suitable solution to provide real time multihop transmissions in noisy and harsh environments. The standard relies on a strict schedule of the transmissions to reduce the radio duty cycle ratio. While constructing a schedule for periodic traffic has been widely studied in the past, we focus here on the aperiodic, sporadic case. We have to multiplex the transmissions in the schedule to reduce the energy consumption while limiting the number of collisions to provide still high reliability. We propose here to study experimentally the performance of TSCH with shared access and bursty arrivals. Then, we demonstrate how to re-adapt the scheduler to better deal with unpredictable traffic. By performing experiments, we can predict the optimal number of transmitters in a shared cell. Thus, we can overcome collisions and packets drops in complex scenarios where bursty traffic is required

Is Link-Layer Anycast Scheduling Relevant for IEEE802.15.4-TSCH Networks?

International audienceWith the wide adoption of low-power wireless transmissions , industrial networks have started to incorporate wireless devices in their communication infrastructure. Specifically, IEEE802.15.4-TSCH enables slow channel hopping to increase the robustness, and relies on a strict schedule of the transmissions to increase the energy efficiency. Anycast is a link-layer technique to improve the reliability when using lossy links. Several receivers are associated to a single transmission. That way, a transmission is considered erroneous when none of the receivers was able to decode and acknowledge it. Appropriately exploited by the routing layer, we can also increase the fault-tolerance. However, most of the anycast schemes have been evaluated by simulations, for a sake of simplicity. Besides, most evaluation models assume that packet drops are independent events, which may not be the case for packet drops due to e.g. external interference. Here, we use a large dataset obtained through an indoor testbed to assess the gain of using anycast in real conditions. We also propose a strategy to select the set of forwarding nodes: they must increase the reliability by providing the most independent packet losses. We demonstrate using our experimental dataset that anycast improves really the performance, but only when respecting a set of rules to select the next hops in the routing layer

Efficient Control Message Dissemination in Dense Wireless Lighting Networks

Modern lighting systems using LED light sources lead to dense lighting installations. The control of such systems using wireless Machine-to-Machine (M2M) where standard LED light sources are replaced by wirelessly controllable LED light sources create new problems which are investigated in this thesis. Current approaches for control message transmission is such networks are based on broadcasting messages among luminaires. However, adequate communication performance - in particular, sufficiently low latency and synchronicity - is difficult to ensure in such networks, in particular, if the network is part of a wireless building management system and carries not only low-latency broadcast messages but also collects data from sensors. In this thesis, the problem of simultaneously controlling dense wireless lighting control networks with a higher number of luminaires is addressed. Extensive computer simulation shows that current state-of-the-art protocols are not suitable for lighting control applications, especially if complex applications are required such as dimming or colour tuning. The novel D³LC-Suite is proposed, which is specially designed for dense wireless lighting control networks. This suite includes three sub-protocols. First, a protocol to organize a network in form of a cluster tree named CIDER. To ensure that intra-cluster messages can be exchanged simultaneously, a weighted colouring algorithm is applied to reduce the inter cluster interference. To disseminate efficiently control messages a protocol is proposed named RLL. The D³LC-Suite is evaluated and validated using different methods. A convergence analysis show that CIDER is able to form a network in a matter of minutes. Simulation results of RLL indicate that this protocol is well suited for dense wireless applications. In extensive experiments, it is shown that the D³LC-Suite advances the current state-of-the-art in several aspects. The suite is able to deliver control messages across multiple hops meeting the requirements of lighting applications. Especially, it provides a deterministic latency, very promising packet loss ratios in low interference environments, and mechanisms for simultaneous message delivery which is important in terms of Quality of Experience (QoE

Long-Term Stable Communication in Centrally Scheduled Low-Power Wireless Networks

With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), more devices are connected than ever before. Most of these communicate wirelessly, forming Wireless Sensor Networks. In recent years, there has been a shift from personal networks, like Smart Home, to industrial networks. Industrial networks monitor pipelines or handle the communication between robots in factories. These new applications form the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Many industrial applications have high requirements for communication, higher than the requirements of common IoT networks. Communications must stick to hard deadlines to avoid harm, and they must be highly reliable as skipping information is not a viable option when communicating critical information. Moreover, communication has to remain reliable over longer periods of time. As many sensor locations do not offer a power source, the devices have to run on battery and thus have to be power efficient. Current systems offer solutions for some of these requirements. However, they especially lack long-term stable communication that can dynamically adapt to changes in the wireless medium.In this thesis, we study the problem of stable and reliable communication in centrally scheduled low-power wireless networks. This communication ought to be stable when it can dynamically adapt to changes in the wireless medium while keeping latency at a minimum. We design and investigate approaches to solve the problem of low to high degrees of interference in the wireless medium. We propose three solutions to overcome interference: MASTER with Sliding Windows brings dynamic numbers of retransmissions to centrally scheduled low-power wireless networks, OVERTAKE allows to skip nodes affected by interference along the path, and AUTOBAHN combines opportunistic routing and synchronous transmissions with the Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) MAC protocol to overcome local wide-band interference with the lowest possible latency. We evaluate our approaches in detail on testbed deployments and provide open-source implementations of the protocols to enable others to build their work upon them

Opportunistic Routing and Synchronous Transmissions Meet TSCH

Low-power wireless networking commonly uses either Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH), synchronous transmissions, or opportunistic routing. All three of these different, orthogonal approaches strive for efficient and reliable communication but follow different trajectories. With this paper, we combine these concepts into one protocol: AUTOBAHN.AUTOBAHN merges TSCH scheduling with opportunistically routed, synchronous transmissions. This opens the possibility to create long-term stable schedules overcoming local interference. We prove the stability of schedules over several days in our experimental evaluation. Moreover, AUTOBAHN outperforms the autonomous scheduler Orchestra under interference in terms of reliability by 13.9 percentage points and in terms of latency by a factor of 9 under a minor duty cycle increase of 2.1 percentage points

Constructive Interference in 802.15.4: A Tutorial

International audienceConstructive Interference (CI) can happen when multiple wireless devices send the same frame at the same time. If the time offset between the transmissions is less than 500 ns, a receiver will successfully decode the frame with high probability. CI can be useful for achieving low-latency communication or low-overhead flooding in a multi-hop low-power wireless network. The contribution of this article is threefold. First, we present the current state-of-the-art CI-based protocols. Second, we provide a detailed hands-on tutorial on how to implement CI-based protocols on TelosB motes, with well documented open-source code. Third, we discuss the issues and challenges of CI-based protocols, and list open issues and research directions. This article is targeted at the level of practicing engineers and advanced researchers and can serve both as a primer on CI technology and a reference to its implementation