An Analytical Model for Wireless Mesh Networks with Collision-Free TDMA and Finite Queues

Wireless mesh networks are a promising technology for connecting sensors and actuators with high flexibility and low investment costs. In industrial applications, however, reliability is essential. Therefore, two time-slotted medium access methods, DSME and TSCH, were added to the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. They allow collision-free communication in multi-hop networks and provide channel hopping for mitigating external interferences. The slot schedule used in these networks is of high importance for the network performance. This paper supports the development of efficient schedules by providing an analytical model for the assessment of such schedules, focused on TSCH. A Markov chain model for the finite queue on every node is introduced that takes the slot distribution into account. The models of all nodes are interconnected to calculate network metrics such as packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay and throughput. An evaluation compares the model with a simulation of the Orchestra schedule. The model is applied to Orchestra as well as to two simple distributed scheduling algorithms to demonstrate the importance of traffic-awareness for achieving high throughput.Comment: 17 pages, 14 figure

Avoiding Publication and Privatization Problems on Software Transactional Memory

This paper presents a new approach to exclude problems arising from dynamically switching between protected concurrent and unprotected single-threaded use of shared data when using software transactional memory in OO languages such as Java. The approach is based on a simple but effective programming model separating transactions from non-transactional operation. It prevents the application programmer from errors but does not force the software transactional memory library to observe non-transactional access and thereby preserves modularity of the software. A prototypical toolchain for validation and source code instrumentation was implemented as a proof of concept