Abstract
Steerable directional antennas are increasingly utilised to improve the overall performance of the traditional wireless sensor networks. Steerable directional antenna based networking solutions increase the network capacity by providing a longer range of transmission and reduced interference as compared to networking solutions with omni-directional antennas. However, the use of smart antennas requires complex algorithms and such algorithms may not be easily leveraged in low power Internet of Things (IoT) networks. This study presents mechanisms for integrating low complexity smart antenna solutions into IETF 6TiSCH protocol with the aim of creating scalable and reliable industrial IoT networks. The solution defines extensions to MAC layer and scheduling mechanisms of IETF 6TiSCH protocol to enable its seamless integration with low complexity steerable smart antennas. The results of this study show that smart antenna enabled 6TiSCH protocol stack outperforms the legacy 6TiSCH stack in terms of data delivery performance especially in high density scenarios.
Highlights
I OT networks are envisaged to be employed in a wide range of applications such as habitat monitoring, disaster relief, smart metering, asset tracking, etc
WORK In this paper, adaptation of an electronically steerable antenna to 6TiSCH protocol is investigated by considering performance metrics such as synchronization time, Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), and energy consumption
The proposed Steerable Antenna Agnostic 6TiSCH Solution (SAA6) is extensively evaluated and the results verify that SAA6 outperforms omni-directional antenna based solution in all aspects especially in terms of reliability, and network throughput
Summary
I OT networks are envisaged to be employed in a wide range of applications such as habitat monitoring, disaster relief, smart metering, asset tracking, etc. The use of steerable antennas is not limited to 6TiSCH networks It can be used in other solutions like GALLOP protocol [11] that has very low and deterministic latency, very high reliability and low-overhead signaling mechanism for large networks by providing multipath communication. Use of directional communication makes the neighbor discovery more challenging [19], [20] because of the following reasons: (1) Each node should estimate when and where to point its antenna to discover each potential neighbor, (2) The limited coverage of the directional beam requires the steps to be repeated until the whole azimuth is covered. To be able to discover a neighbor node, the receiving node must be listening at the right time, on the right channel and in the right direction with the transmitter node This requires additional mechanisms to minimize the synchronization time of the 6TiSCH networks. Based on [31], the reference distance (d0) is set to 1 m, the reference path loss is set to -52 dBm, and the path loss exponent is set to 2.5
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