Energy Saving Router Rotation Protocol for DECT-2020 NR

Abstract

ETSI DECT-2020 New Radio (NR) is a new flexible radio interface targeted to support a broad range of wireless Internet of Things (IoT) applications. It has been shown to fulfill both massive machine-type communications (mMTC) and ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC) requirements for 5th generation (5G) networks. DECT-2020 NR is an autonomous wireless mesh network protocol where the devices can choose to become routers, forwarding the data of other devices in addition to their own data. Thus, a wireless mesh network does not need separate base stations or a core network architecture to extend coverage. This makes the deployment of DECT-2020 NR networks easy, but with the cost of increased energy consumption in the router nodes. Notably, the same energy consumption is not inflicted upon the non-routing leaf nodes whose operation is on the contrary very energy efficient. This role-induced disparity in node energy consumption results in the network not using the energy of its devices with maximal efficiency. A method to alleviate this problem could be a network rotation in which the roles of network nodes are periodically rotated and the energy consumption is thus distributed more evenly among the nodes. In this paper we propose a role rotation protocol for DECT-2020 NR and evaluate its impact to the expected lifetime and the performance of the network by system level simulations.