Energy Consumption and Performance of IEEE 802.15.4e TSCH and DSME

International audienceThe recent IEEE 802.15.4e standard has introduced two interesting modes of operation: Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) and Deterministic and Synchronous Multi-channel Extension (DSME). Both provide a mix of time and frequency division to improve the performance of the previously available synchronized MAC mode (beacon-enabled 802.15.4). In this paper, we compare the performance of DSME and TSCH with respect to the energy consumption, throughput, and delay through an analysis of their respective ways of operation. We use an energy consumption model coming from our previous experience on the design of recent energy harvesting motes for the GreenNet platform. Our results show that DSME performs slightly better in terms of the energy consumption spent in data transfers. Both protocols exhibit similar delays for a given duty cycle, nevertheless, TSCH obtains shorter delay and higher throughput for low duty cycles. For higher duty cycles, TSCH results in lower throughput—for applications that send little data, the fixed slot configuration of TSCH results in wasted bandwidth. DSME can allocate shorter slots, which is beneficial for applications that transmit short packets

IEEE 802.15.4e: a Survey

Several studies have highlighted that the IEEE 802.15.4 standard presents a number of limitations such as low reliability, unbounded packet delays and no protection against interference/fading, that prevent its adoption in applications with stringent requirements in terms of reliability and latency. Recently, the IEEE has released the 802.15.4e amendment that introduces a number of enhancements/modifications to the MAC layer of the original standard in order to overcome such limitations. In this paper we provide a clear and structured overview of all the new 802.15.4e mechanisms. After a general introduction to the 802.15.4e standard, we describe the details of the main 802.15.4e MAC behavior modes, namely Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH), Deterministic and Synchronous Multi-channel Extension (DSME), and Low Latency Deterministic Network (LLDN). For each of them, we provide a detailed description and highlight the main features and possible application domains. Also, we survey the current literature and summarize open research issues

Exploração de Covert Channels de Rede sobre comunicações IEEE 802.15.4

The advancements in information and communication technology in the past decades have been converging into a new communication paradigm in which everything is expected to be interconnected with the heightened pervasiveness and ubiquity of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. As these technologies mature, they are increasingly finding its way into more sensitive domains, such as Medical and Industrial IoT, in which safety and cyber-security are paramount. While the number of deployed IoT devices continues to increase annually, up to tens of billions of connected devices, IoT devices continue to present severe cyber-security vulnerabilities, which are worsened by challenges such as scalability, heterogeneity, and their often scarce computing capacity. Network covert channels are increasingly being used to support malware with stealthy behaviours, aiming at exfiltrating data or to orchestrate nodes of a botnet in a cloaked fashion. Nevertheless, the attention to this problem regarding underlying and pervasive IoT protocols such as the IEEE 802.15.4 has been scarce. Therefore, in this Thesis, we aim at analysing the performance and feasibility of such covertchannel implementations upon the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol to support the development of new mechanisms and add-ons that can effectively contribute to improve the current state of-art of IoT systems which rely on such, or similar underlying communication technologies.Os avanços nas tecnologias de informação e comunicação nas últimas décadas têm convergido num novo paradigma de comunicação, onde se espera que todos os intervenientes estejam interconectados pela ubiquidade do paradigma da Internet of Things (Internet das Coisas). Com a maturação destas tecnologias, elas têm-se vindo a infiltrar em domínios cada vez mais sensíveis, como nas aplicações médicas e industriais, onde a confiabilidade da informação e cyber-segurança são um fator crítico. Num contexto onde o número de dispositivos IoT continua a aumentar anualmente, já na ordem das dezenas de biliões de dispositivos interconectados, estes continuam, contudo, a apresentar severas vulnerabilidades no campo da cyber-segurança, sendo que os desafios como a escalabilidade, heterogeneidade e, na maioria das vezes, a sua baixa capacidade de processamento, tornam ainda mais complexa a sua resolução de forma permanente. Os covert channels de rede são cada vez mais um meio de suporte a malwares que apresentam comportamentos furtivos, almejando a extração de informação sensível ou a orquestração de nós de uma botnet de uma forma camuflada. Contudo, a atenção dada a este problema em protocolos de rede IoT abrangentes como o IEEE 802.15.4, tem sido escassa. Portanto, nesta tese, pretende-se elaborar uma análise da performance e da viabilidade da implementação de covert channels em modelos de rede onde figura o protocolo IEEE 802.15.4 de forma a suportar o desenvolvimento de novos mecanismos e complementos que podem efetivamente contribuir para melhorar a ciber-segurança de sistemas IoT que dependem do suporte destas tecnologias de comunicação

Improving network formation in IEEE 802.15.4e DSME

Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks are becoming attractive also for industrial applications, since recent standardization efforts have introduced significant improvement to reliability and deterministic communication delays. In this context, IEEE 802.15.4e is widely considered the major improvement, introducing many enhancements to the original IEEE 802.15.4 standard aimed at supporting critical applications. Among the new defined MAC protocols, Deterministic and Synchronous Multi-channel Extension (DSME) represents the most suitable option for applications with time-varying requirements. In this paper, an analysis of the IEEE 802.15.4 DSME MAC protocol during network formation is presented. The goal is to study the protocol performance and propose solutions to reduce the network formation time, improving energy and resource efficiency. To carry out the performance evaluation, DSME has been fully implemented in Contiki OS, an actual operating system for sensor nodes. The study has highlighted issues and inefficiencies in the network formation process, allowing to consequently propose effective solutions. In particular, it is proposed a set of guidelines for DSME configuration to the original MAC protocol that are proved to increase significantly the network formation efficiency

Enhancement of the Contention Access Period for Reducing Energy Consumption of Industrial Internet of Things Based on IPv6

Abstract: Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is an emerging technology in recent years, which is widely utilized for control, manage the manufacturing environment, and monitor production lines in the smart factories. The IPv6 has enabled the use of many IIoT devices, so these devices consume large amounts of energy. Many research efforts were made in this area aimed to improve power consumption and performance. This paper proposed the Contention Access Period Reduction Medium Access Control protocol (CAP Reduction MAC protocol) for reducing the CAP duration size based on IEEE 802.15.4e. The proposed MAC protocol leads to reduce the CAP portion. Thus the number of time slots, which assigned to the sensors will decrease. Moreover, this paper intends to estimate the performance of IIoT devices in terms of energy consumption, throughput, and delay time through an analysis of their respective ways of operation running the Contiki Operating System (OS). To validate the proposed protocol, different experiments are conducted based on the Cooja simulator. The proposed protocol can be reduced the overall energy consumption with up to 64.14 %, decreases the delay by 33.7 %, and increases throughput by 63.0 %

A Performance-to-Cost Analysis of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC With 802.15.4e MAC Modes

[EN] The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is one of the widely adopted networking specification for Internet of Things (IoT). It defines several physical layer (PHY) options and medium access control (MAC) sub-layer protocols for interconnection of constrained wireless devices. These devices are usually battery-powered and need to support requirements like low-power consumption and low-data rates. The standard has been revised twice to incorporate new PHY layers and improvements learned from implementations. Research in this direction has been primarily centered around improving the energy consumption of devices. Recently, to meet specific Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements of different industrial applications, the IEEE 802.15.4e amendment was released that focuses on improving reliability, robustness and latency. In this paper, we carry out a performance-to-cost analysis of Deterministic and Synchronous Multi-channel Extension (DSME) and Time-slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) MAC modes of IEEE 802.15.4e with 802.15.4 MAC protocol to analyze the trade-off of choosing a particular MAC mode over others. The parameters considered for performance are throughput and latency, and the cost is quantified in terms of energy. A Markov model has been developed for TSCH MAC mode to compare its energy costs with 802.15.4 MAC. Finally, we present the applicability of different MAC modes to different application scenarios.This work was supported in part by the SERB, DST, Government of India under Grant ECRA/2016/001651.Choudhury, N.; Matam, R.; Mukherjee, M.; Lloret, J. (2020). A Performance-to-Cost Analysis of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC With 802.15.4e MAC Modes. IEEE Access. 8:41936-41950. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2976654S4193641950

Towards Worst-Case Bounds Analysis of the IEEE 802.15.4e

Work in Progress Session, 22nd IEEE Real-Time Embedded Technology & Applications Symposium (RTAS 2016). 11 to 14, Apr, 2016. Viena, Austria.The IEEE 802.15.4e amendment provides important functionalities to address timeliness and reliability in timesensitive WSN applications, by extending the IEEE 802.15.4-2011 protocol. Nevertheless, in other to make the appropriate network design choices, it is mandatory to understand the behavior of such networks under worst-case conditions. This paper contributes in that direction by proposing a methodology based on Network Calculus that will, by modeling the fundamental performance limits of such networks, enable in the future a quick and efficient worst-case dimensioning of the networks’ schedule and resources.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

TSCH Multiflow Scheduling with QoS Guarantees: A Comparison of SDN with Common Schedulers

[EN] Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSN) are becoming increasingly popular in production environments due to their ease of deployment, low cost and energy efficiency. However, the complexity and accuracy demanded by these environments requires that IWSN implement quality of service mechanisms that allow them to operate with high determinism. For this reason, the IEEE 802.15.4e standard incorporates the Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) protocol which reduces interference and increases the reliability of transmissions. This standard does not specify how time resources are allocated in TSCH scheduling, leading to multiple scheduling solutions. Schedulers can be classified as autonomous, distributed and centralised. The first two have prevailed over the centralised ones because they do not require high signalling, along with the advantages of ease of deployment and high performance. However, the increased QoS requirements and the diversity of traffic flows that circulate through the network in today's Industry 4.0 environment require strict, dynamic control to guarantee parameters such as delay, packet loss and deadline, independently for each flow. That cannot always be achieved with distributed or autonomous schedulers. For this reason, it is necessary to use centralised protocols with a disruptive approach, such as Software Defined Networks (SDN). In these, not only is the control of the MAC layer centralised, but all the decisions of the nodes that make up the network are configured by the controller based on a global vision of the topology and resources, which allows optimal decisions to be made. In this work, a comparative analysis is made through simulation and a testbed of the different schedulers to demonstrate the benefits of a fully centralized approach such as SDN. The results obtained show that with SDN it is possible to simplify the management of multiple flows, without the problems of centralised schedulers. SDN maintains the Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) levels of other distributed solutions, but in addition, it achieves greater determinism with bounded end-to-end delays and Deadline Satisfaction Ratio (DSR) at the cost of increased power consumption.This work has been supported by DAIS (https://dais-project.eu/) which has received funding from the ECSEL Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 101007273. The JU receives support from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Germany, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Turkey. It has also been funded by Generalitat Valenciana through the "Instituto Valenciano de Competitividad Empresarial-IVACE". Furthermore, has been supported by the MCyU (Spanish Ministry of Science and Universities) under the project ATLAS (PGC2018-094151-B-I00), which is partially funded by AEI, FEDER and EU.Orozco-Santos, F.; Sempere Paya, VM.; Silvestre-Blanes, J.; Albero Albero, T. (2022). TSCH Multiflow Scheduling with QoS Guarantees: A Comparison of SDN with Common Schedulers. Applied Sciences. 12(1):1-19. https://doi.org/10.3390/app1201011911912