Narrow-band and low latency routing algorithms in wireless mesh networks for Internet of Things applications

Abstract

With the development of smart homes, more and more smart home devices are equipped with networking features, and networking technology has been widely applied in smart devices. In order to meet the networking requirements of small, low power consumption, low cost and short distance portable terminal equipment, the short distance wireless technology has been developed rapidly. Currently, the short distance wireless networking technologies used in smart homes in the field of whole-house intelligence mainly include star wireless network technologies, represented by WiFi and Bluetooth, and wireless mesh network technologies, represented by Bluetooth (BLE) mesh and ZigBee. Compared to the star wireless network technologies such as WiFi and Bluetooth , the wireless mesh network technologies have the advantage that the device itself can act as a route node for other devices. The communication range is extended by means of multiple hops, then all the nodes can constitute a mesh so that the communication signals can well cover the entire house, avoiding the problem of weak signals or connection failures incurred by the fact that the WiFi device is located in remote corners. However, the BLE mesh and ZigBee wireless mesh network technologies still have limitations. BLE mesh networks use the flooding algorithm to transmit data from the source node to the destination node from near to far layer by layer, which is like flooding. But due to the use of the flooding routing algorithm, all devices need to perform broadcast forwarding in each communication process, resulting in low communication efficiency and high wireless bandwidth occupancy. ZigBee uses a wireless routing algorithm based on an Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) standard, which is more efficient than BLE mesh, but it is still a bit inadequate in the case of multi-node networks, reflected in not ideal stability and communication delay. In this paper, the O-Mesh mesh routing algorithm with low network overhead and high efficiency was proposed, which effectively improves the performance of the entire wireless mesh network through mechanisms such as central node routing, neighbor node management, multiple node reuse for route discovery, alternate path caching, and central node data forwarding, resulting in a significant increase in total network throughput and average delay. Telink's chip TLSR8258 supporting multiple protocols (ZigBee, BLE mesh) was used for testing and verification, and the results showed that the average communication delay was reduced by 28% compared to ZigBee.