Impact of Guard Time Length on IEEE 802.15.4e TSCH Energy Consumption

The IEEE 802.15.4-2015 standard defines a number of Medium Access Control (MAC) layer protocols for low- power wireless communications in the IoT. Originally defined in the IEEE 802.15.4e amendment, TSCH (Time Slotted Channel Hopping) is among the proposed mechanisms. TSCH is a scheme aiming to guarantee network reliability by keeping nodes time-synchronised at the MAC layer. In order to ensure successful communication between a sender and a receiver, the latter starts listening shortly before the expected time of a MAC layer frame’s arrival. The offset between the time a node starts listening and the estimated time of frame arrival is called guard time and it aims to reduce the probability of missed frames due to clock drift. In this poster, we investigate the effect of the guard time duration on energy consumption. We identify that, when using the 6tisch minimal schedule, the most significant cause of energy consumption is idle listening during guard time. Therefore, the energy-efficiency of TSCH can be significantly improved by guard time optimisation. Our performance evaluation results, conducted using the Contiki operating system, show that an efficient configuration of guard time may reduce energy consumption by up to 30%, without compromising network reliability

A Case for Time Slotted Channel Hopping for ICN in the IoT

Recent proposals to simplify the operation of the IoT include the use of Information Centric Networking (ICN) paradigms. While this is promising, several challenges remain. In this paper, our core contributions (a) leverage ICN communication patterns to dynamically optimize the use of TSCH (Time Slotted Channel Hopping), a wireless link layer technology increasingly popular in the IoT, and (b) make IoT-style routing adaptive to names, resources, and traffic patterns throughout the network--both without cross-layering. Through a series of experiments on the FIT IoT-LAB interconnecting typical IoT hardware, we find that our approach is fully robust against wireless interference, and almost halves the energy consumed for transmission when compared to CSMA. Most importantly, our adaptive scheduling prevents the time-slotted MAC layer from sacrificing throughput and delay

Standardized low-power wireless communication technologies for distributed sensing applications

Recent standardization efforts on low-power wireless communication technologies, including time-slotted channel hopping (TSCH) and DASH7 Alliance Mode (D7AM), are starting to change industrial sensing applications, enabling networks to scale up to thousands of nodes whilst achieving high reliability. Past technologies, such as ZigBee, rooted in IEEE 802.15.4, and ISO 18000-7, rooted in frame-slotted ALOHA (FSA), are based on contention medium access control (MAC) layers and have very poor performance in dense networks, thus preventing the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm from really taking off. Industrial sensing applications, such as those being deployed in oil refineries, have stringent requirements on data reliability and are being built using new standards. Despite the benefits of these new technologies, industrial shifts are not happening due to the enormous technology development and adoption costs and the fact that new standards are not well-known and completely understood. In this article, we provide a deep analysis of TSCH and D7AM, outlining operational and implementation details with the aim of facilitating the adoption of these technologies to sensor application developers.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

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

Survey on wireless technology trade-offs for the industrial internet of things

Aside from vast deployment cost reduction, Industrial Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (IWSAN) introduce a new level of industrial connectivity. Wireless connection of sensors and actuators in industrial environments not only enables wireless monitoring and actuation, it also enables coordination of production stages, connecting mobile robots and autonomous transport vehicles, as well as localization and tracking of assets. All these opportunities already inspired the development of many wireless technologies in an effort to fully enable Industry 4.0. However, different technologies significantly differ in performance and capabilities, none being capable of supporting all industrial use cases. When designing a network solution, one must be aware of the capabilities and the trade-offs that prospective technologies have. This paper evaluates the technologies potentially suitable for IWSAN solutions covering an entire industrial site with limited infrastructure cost and discusses their trade-offs in an effort to provide information for choosing the most suitable technology for the use case of interest. The comparative discussion presented in this paper aims to enable engineers to choose the most suitable wireless technology for their specific IWSAN deployment

Guard time optimisation and adaptation for energy efficient multi-hop TSCH networks

International audienceIn the IEEE 802.15.4-2015 standard, Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) aims to guarantee high-level network reliability by keeping nodes time-synchronised. In order to ensure successful communication between a sender and a receiver, the latter starts listening shortly before the expected time of a MAC layer frame's arrival. The offset between the time a node starts listening and the estimated time of frame arrival is called guard time and it aims to reduce the probability of missed frames due to clock drift. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the guard time on network performance. We identify that, when using the 6tisch minimal schedule, the most significant cause of energy consumption is idle listening during guard time. Therefore, we first perform mathematical modelling on a TSCH link to identify the guard time that maximises the energy-efficiency of the TSCH network in single hop topology. We then continue in multi-hop network, where we empirically adapt the guard time locally at each node depending its distance, in terms of hops, from the sink. Our performance evaluation results, conducted using the Contiki OS, demonstrate that the proposed decentralised guard time adaptation can reduce the energy consumption by up to 40%, without compromising network reliability

Towards efficient coexistence of IEEE 802.15.4e TSCH and IEEE 802.11

A major challenge in wide deployment of smart wireless devices, using different technologies and sharing the same 2.4 GHz spectrum, is to achieve coexistence across multiple technologies. The IEEE~802.11 (WLAN) and the IEEE 802.15.4e TSCH (WSN) where designed with different goals in mind and both play important roles for respective applications. However, they cause mutual interference and degraded performance while operating in the same space. To improve this situation we propose an approach to enable a cooperative control which type of network is transmitting at given time, frequency and place. We recognize that TSCH based sensor network is expected to occupy only small share of time, and that the nodes are by design tightly synchronized. We develop mechanism enabling over-the-air synchronization of the Wi-Fi network to the TSCH based sensor network. Finally, we show that Wi-Fi network can avoid transmitting in the "collision periods". We provide full design and show prototype implementation based on the Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices. Our solution does not require changes in any of the standards.Comment: 8 page

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 %

Adaptive multi-PHY IEEE802.15.4 TSCH in sub-GHz industrial wireless networks

To provide wireless coverage in challenging industrial environments, IEEE802.15.4 Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) presents a robust medium access protocol. Using multiple Physical Layers (PHYs) could improve TSCH even more in these heterogeneous environments. However, TSCH only defines one fixedduration timeslot structure allowing one packet transmission. Using multiple PHYs with various data rates therefore does not yield any improvements because of this single-packet limitation combined with a fixed slot duration. We therefore defined two alternative timeslot structures allowing multiple packets transmissions to increase the throughput for higher data rate PHYs while meeting a fixed slot duration. In addition, we developed a flexible Link Quality Estimation (LQE) technique to dynamically switch between PHYs depending on the current environment. This paper covers a theoretical evaluation of the proposed slot structures in terms of throughput, energy consumption and memory constraints backed with an experimental validation, using a proof-of-concept implementation, which includes topology and PHY switching. Our results show that a 153% higher net throughput can be obtained with 84% of the original energy consumption and confirm our theoretical evaluation with a 99 % accuracy. Additionally, we showed that in a real-life testbed of 33 nodes, spanning three floors and covering 2550 m(2), a compact multi-PHY TSCH network can be formed. By distinguishing between reliable and high throughput PHYs, a maximum hop count of three was achieved with a maximum throughput of 219 kbps. Consequently, using multiple (dynamic) PHYs in a single TSCH network is possible while still being backwards compatible to the original fixed slot duration TSCH standard

Relevance- and Aggregation-based Scheduling for Data Transmission in IEEE 802.15.4e IoT Networks

Master's thesis Information- and communication technology IKT590 - University of Agder 2017Internet of thing (IoT) is regarded as a new communicating paradigm with Internet connectivity enabling embedded devices to interact with each other on a global scale. IoT has the potential to become the largest producer of information because of a massive number of connected devices with diverse applications ranging from environmental monitoring, home, and building automation. This ubiquitous connectivity requires reliability, efficiency, and sustainability of access to information. As an enabling technology, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have opened new opportunity with recent technological developments in making miniaturized smart connected devices. With an increase in the activity of these smart devices, there are challenges in maintaining their limited energy, lifetime, and reliability required for IoT applications. The reason is that these devices are mostly battery powered. In this respect, an insight into the activities of sensing devices produced by different vendors with interoperability based on industrial standards is needed. As an enhancement of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC sublayer, the ratification of IEEE 802.15.4e standard makes a step towards IoT medium access control (MAC) for industrial applications. One of the significant enhancements in IEEE 802.15.4e is different MAC modes. However, IEEE 802.15.4e does not specify standardized scheduling policy for network building and data transmission maintenance. It is basically application specific. In general, activities performed at the MAC sublayer contribute to sensor energy consumption. Therefore, an efficient MAC scheme is needed to utilize network resources more efficiently, minimize energy consumption level and at the same time improve data transmission of the network. In this thesis work, we focus on proposing transmission schemes for improving energy consumption for data transmission in IoT networks and as well as increasing average packet delivery ratio (PDR). Our target is to improve time slotted channel hopping (TSCH) mode that enables deterministic access and robust network. The focus is on dedicated and shared slots in TSCH. More specifically, we propose two MAC schemes; relevance- and aggregation-based scheduling for data transmission in IEEE 802.15.4e IoT networks. With relevance-based scheduling, the coordinator node builds and maintains communication in the network based on a historical data value of member nodes. On the other hand, aggregation-based scheduling iii enables the coordinator node to build and maintain communication by integrating multiple data inside a single frame payload at the source node before transmission. Further, the proposed schemes are implemented using network simulator version 3 (ns-3). We use Ubuntu 16.04.2 as the operating system for our implementation and performance evaluation. Numerical results for a few performance metrics including PDR, collision probability, delay, and energy consumption are obtained through extensive simulations. The superiority of the proposed schemes is demonstrated by comparing the simulation results with that of IEEE 802.15.4e TSCH standard under varies network scenario