'Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)'
Abstract
This paper has been presented at : The 44th IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN) October 14-17, 2019.In Press / En PrensaIn this paper, we address the support of Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) on multiple frequency bands within a single TSCH network. This allows to simultaneously run applications with different requirements on link characteristics and to increase resilience against interference. To this end, we first enable sub-GHz communication in TSCH, which has been primarily defined for the 2.4 GHz band. Thereafter, we propose two designs to support multiple physical layers in TSCH on the same nodes. Our experimental evaluation shows that TSCH is applicable in a wide range of data rates between 1.2 kbps and 1000 kbps. We find that data rates of 50 kbps and below have a long communication range and a nearly perfect link symmetry, but also have a 20x higher channel utilization compared to higher data rates, increasing the risk of collisions. Using these findings, we show the advantages of the multi-band support on the example of synchronization accuracy when exchanging TSCH beacons with a low data rate and application data at a high data rate.This work was financed by the H2020 collaborative Europe/Taiwan research project 5G-CORAL (grant num. 761586), the ERCIM Alain Bensoussan postdoc fellowship program, and the distributed environment E-care@home, funded by the Swedish Knowledge Foundation