The Impact of Packet Fragmentation and Reassembly in Resource Constrained Wireless Networks

Low-power and lossy (LLN) networks, including Wireless Sensor Networks, provide an important building block for Internet of Things (IoT) technology. The resource constraints associated with LLN devices necessitate the redesign of a number of basic Internet protocols. This paper evaluates the effect of packet fragmentation on the performance of protocols redesigned for LLN systems. We focus on the important class of tree-based LLNs that exhibit both one-to-many and many-to-one communication patterns. In particular, we measure the impact of fragmentation on these communication protocols. Our results demonstrate that excessive packet fragmentation has a tremendously negative impact on communication within a tree-based LLN system. This work provides a guideline for IoT engineers in techniques for avoiding these damaging effects

Lower and upper bounds for deterministic convergecast with labeling schemes

In wireless networks, broadcast and convergecast are the two most used communication primitives. Broadcast instructs a specific sink (or root) node to send a message to each node in the network. Convergecast instructs each node in the network to send a message to the sink. Without labels, deterministic convergecast is impossible even in a three-nodes network. Therefore, networking solutions for convergecast are based on probabilistic approaches or use underlying probabilistic medium access protocols such as CSMA/CA or CSMA/CD. In this paper, we focus on deterministic convergecast algorithms enhanced with labeling schemes. We investigate two communication modes: half-duplex (nodes either transmit or receive but not both at the same time) and full-duplex (nodes can transmit and receive data at the same time). For these two modes we investigate time and labeling lower and upper bounds. Even though broadcast and convergecast are similar, we prove that, contrary to broadcast, deterministic convergecast cannot be solved with short labels for some topologies. That is, O(log(n)) bits are necessary to solve deterministically convergecast where n is the number of nodes in the network. We also prove that O(n) communication time slots is required. We provide solutions that are optimal in the worst case scenarios, in terms of labeling and communication

Real-Time and Energy-Efficient Routing for Industrial Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks

With the emergence of industrial standards such as WirelessHART, process industries are adopting Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks (WSANs) that enable sensors and actuators to communicate through low-power wireless mesh networks. Industrial monitoring and control applications require real-time communication among sensors, controllers and actuators within end-to-end deadlines. Deadline misses may lead to production inefficiency, equipment destruction to irreparable financial and environmental impacts. Moreover, due to the large geographic area and harsh conditions of many industrial plants, it is labor-intensive or dan- gerous to change batteries of field devices. It is therefore important to achieve long network lifetime with battery-powered devices. This dissertation tackles these challenges and make a series of contributions. (1) We present a new end-to-end delay analysis for feedback control loops whose transmissions are scheduled based on the Earliest Deadline First policy. (2) We propose a new real-time routing algorithm that increases the real-time capacity of WSANs by exploiting the insights of the delay analysis. (3) We develop an energy-efficient routing algorithm to improve the network lifetime while maintaining path diversity for reliable communication. (4) Finally, we design a distributed game-theoretic algorithm to allocate sensing applications with near-optimal quality of sensing