Atomic-SDN: Is Synchronous Flooding the Solution to Software-Defined Networking in IoT?

The adoption of Software Defined Networking (SDN) within traditional networks has provided operators the ability to manage diverse resources and easily reconfigure networks as requirements change. Recent research has extended this concept to IEEE 802.15.4 low-power wireless networks, which form a key component of the Internet of Things (IoT). However, the multiple traffic patterns necessary for SDN control makes it difficult to apply this approach to these highly challenging environments. This paper presents Atomic-SDN, a highly reliable and low-latency solution for SDN in low-power wireless. Atomic-SDN introduces a novel Synchronous Flooding (SF) architecture capable of dynamically configuring SF protocols to satisfy complex SDN control requirements, and draws from the authors' previous experiences in the IEEE EWSN Dependability Competition: where SF solutions have consistently outperformed other entries. Using this approach, Atomic-SDN presents considerable performance gains over other SDN implementations for low-power IoT networks. We evaluate Atomic-SDN through simulation and experimentation, and show how utilizing SF techniques provides latency and reliability guarantees to SDN control operations as the local mesh scales. We compare Atomic-SDN against other SDN implementations based on the IEEE 802.15.4 network stack, and establish that Atomic-SDN improves SDN control by orders-of-magnitude across latency, reliability, and energy-efficiency metrics

Latency and Power Consumption in 2.4 GHz IoT Wireless Mesh Nodes: An Experimental Evaluation of Bluetooth Mesh and Wirepas Mesh

The rapid growth of the Internet of Things paradigm is pushing the need to connect billions of batteryoperated devices to the internet and among them. To address this need, the introduction of energy-efficient wireless mesh networks based on Bluetooth provides an effective solution. This paper proposes a testbed setup to accurately evaluate and compare the standard Bluetooth Mesh 5.0 and the emerging energy-efficient Wirepas protocol that promises better performance. The paper presents the evaluation in terms of power consumption, energy efficiency, and transmission latency which are the most crucial features, in a controlled and reproducible test setup consisting of 10 nodes. Experimental results demonstrated that Wirepas has a median latency of 2.83 ms in Low-Latency mode respectively around 2 s in the Low-Energy mode. The corresponding power consumption is 6.2 mA in Low-Latency mode and 38.9 uA in Low-Energy mode. For Bluetooth Mesh the median latency is 4.54 ms with a power consumption of 6.2 mA at 3.3 V. Based on this comparison, conclusions about the advantages and disadvantages of both technologies can be drawn.Comment: This article has been accepted for publication in the proceedings of the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking And Communications (WiMob). DOI: 10.1109/WiMob58348.2023.1018779

Low-Latency Broadcast in Multirate Wireless Mesh Networks

Special Issue on “Multi-Hop Wireless Mesh Networks”</p

Scalability of broadcast performance in wireless network-on-chip

Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) are currently the paradigm of choice to interconnect the cores of a chip multiprocessor. However, conventional NoCs may not suffice to fulfill the on-chip communication requirements of processors with hundreds or thousands of cores. The main reason is that the performance of such networks drops as the number of cores grows, especially in the presence of multicast and broadcast traffic. This not only limits the scalability of current multiprocessor architectures, but also sets a performance wall that prevents the development of architectures that generate moderate-to-high levels of multicast. In this paper, a Wireless Network-on-Chip (WNoC) where all cores share a single broadband channel is presented. Such design is conceived to provide low latency and ordered delivery for multicast/broadcast traffic, in an attempt to complement a wireline NoC that will transport the rest of communication flows. To assess the feasibility of this approach, the network performance of WNoC is analyzed as a function of the system size and the channel capacity, and then compared to that of wireline NoCs with embedded multicast support. Based on this evaluation, preliminary results on the potential performance of the proposed hybrid scheme are provided, together with guidelines for the design of MAC protocols for WNoC.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

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

Network Adaptive Interference Aware Routing Metric for Hybrid Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks provide a reliable, robust and resilient platform for broadband access. Main benefits of using Wireless Mesh Networks are their low cost, robustness, self healing, and self configuring properties. In Wireless Mesh Networks, routing metric determines the path from source to destination. Wireless link conditions can be affected by a number of factors including interference, congestion, mobility, and network topology. Routing metric needs to consider all these factors while making routing decisions. In addition, wireless link conditions do not remain static with time requiring the routing metric to be adaptive. Interference in Wireless Mesh Networks are of two types: inter-channel and intra-channel interference. Existing routing metrics for Wireless Mesh Networks either consider only one of the two interference types or do not capture changing network conditions. In this paper, we propose a new routing metric for Wireless Mesh Networks which takes into account both inter and intra-channel interference and is adaptive to changing network conditions. Our proposed metric is compared with the state of the art and shows throughput improvement of up to 20 percent and latency reduction of 25 percent

To mesh or not to mesh: flexible wireless indoor communication among mobile robots in industrial environments

Mobile robots such as automated guided vehicles become increasingly important in industry as they can greatly increase efficiency. For their operation such robots must rely on wireless communication, typically realized by connecting them to an existing enterprise network. In this paper we motivate that such an approach is not always economically viable or might result in performance issues. Therefore we propose a flexible and configurable mixed architecture that leverages on mesh capabilities whenever appropriate. Through experiments on a wireless testbed for a variety of scenarios, we analyse the impact of roaming, mobility and traffic separation and demonstrate the potential of our approach

Power aware routing algorithms (PARA) in wireless mesh networks for emergency management

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) integrate the advantages of WLANs and mobile Ad Hoc networks, which have become the key techniques of next-generation wireless networks in the context of emergency recovery. Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are multi-hop wireless networks with instant deployment, self-healing, self-organization and self-configuration features. These capabilities make WMNs a promising technology for incident and emergency communication. An incident area network (IAN) needs a reliable and lively routing path during disaster recovery and emergency response operations when infrastructure-based communications and power resources have been destroyed and no routes are available. Power aware routing plays a significant role in WMNs, in order to provide continuous efficient emergency services. The existing power aware routing algorithms used in wireless networks cannot fully fit the characteristics of WMNs, to be used for emergency recovery. This paper proposes a power aware routing algorithm (PARA) for WMNs, which selects optimal paths to send packets, mainly based on the power level of next node along the path. This algorithm was implemented and tested in a proven simulator. The analytic results show that the proposed power node-type aware routing algorithm metric can clearly improve the network performance by reducing the network overheads and maintaining a high delivery ratio with low latency

Wireless industrial monitoring and control networks: the journey so far and the road ahead

While traditional wired communication technologies have played a crucial role in industrial monitoring and control networks over the past few decades, they are increasingly proving to be inadequate to meet the highly dynamic and stringent demands of today’s industrial applications, primarily due to the very rigid nature of wired infrastructures. Wireless technology, however, through its increased pervasiveness, has the potential to revolutionize the industry, not only by mitigating the problems faced by wired solutions, but also by introducing a completely new class of applications. While present day wireless technologies made some preliminary inroads in the monitoring domain, they still have severe limitations especially when real-time, reliable distributed control operations are concerned. This article provides the reader with an overview of existing wireless technologies commonly used in the monitoring and control industry. It highlights the pros and cons of each technology and assesses the degree to which each technology is able to meet the stringent demands of industrial monitoring and control networks. Additionally, it summarizes mechanisms proposed by academia, especially serving critical applications by addressing the real-time and reliability requirements of industrial process automation. The article also describes certain key research problems from the physical layer communication for sensor networks and the wireless networking perspective that have yet to be addressed to allow the successful use of wireless technologies in industrial monitoring and control networks