A measurement study on device-to-device communication technologies for IIoT

Abstract

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) connect all components of the factory by constructing low-delay and high-reliability network (wired or wireless), realizing ubiquitous interconnection and smooth data communication, and finally forming an intelligent and efficient industrial ecosystem. There are three widely used device-to-device (D2D) techniques, including Bluetooth (BT), WiFi Hotspot (WFH) and WiFi Direct (WFD), which could provide wireless connections and communications for IIoT devices when the WLANs or cellular networks are unavailable. These D2D communication techniques have gained popularity with the emergence of offloading computing as well as edge computing. Existing studies investigate the outdated versions of BT and WFH, and there are no studies comprehensively comparing them together.In this paper, we conduct a comparative study of the three D2D communication techniques from the aspects of power consumption and transmission performance. Experimental results indicate that BT consumes the lowest power. Power consumption of BT in working state is almost equal to that of WFH and WFD in idle states. However, BT exhibits a poor performance in data transmission. The maximum transmission rate for BT is 1.6 Mbps, while the value is around 50 Mbps for WFH and WFD. We find that TCP/UDP performance of WFH is a little better than WFD. However, WFH also consumes a bit more power than WFD. As a result, WFH is nearly at the same level as WFD when considering the throughput and power consumption together. Taken the results at 2.4 GHz band as an example, the TCP throughput/power for both of them is 4.63 KB/mWs at the sender, while at the receiver, they also have the same value of 6 KB/mWs. We believe that the measurement results are fundamental for constructing high-performance and power-efficient device-to-device communication networks with IIoT devices.