Abstract
Recent standardization efforts on low-power wireless communication technologies, including time-slotted channel hopping (TSCH) and DASH7 Alliance Mode (D7AM), are starting to change industrial sensing applications, enabling networks to scale up to thousands of nodes whilst achieving high reliability. Past technologies, such as ZigBee, rooted in IEEE 802.15.4, and ISO 18000-7, rooted in frame-slotted ALOHA (FSA), are based on contention medium access control (MAC) layers and have very poor performance in dense networks, thus preventing the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm from really taking off. Industrial sensing applications, such as those being deployed in oil refineries, have stringent requirements on data reliability and are being built using new standards. Despite the benefits of these new technologies, industrial shifts are not happening due to the enormous technology development and adoption costs and the fact that new standards are not well-known and completely understood. In this article, we provide a deep analysis of TSCH and D7AM, outlining operational and implementation details with the aim of facilitating the adoption of these technologies to sensor application developers.
Highlights
A major challenge to implement distributed sensing applications lays in the selection of the appropriate wireless technology, as the communication requirements are not the same for each application [1,2,3]
In this article, we explore the implementation of state-of-the-art low-power wireless communication technologies for sensing applications and outline the key challenges and difficulties that need to be addressed with the aim of boosting and facilitating the development of these wireless technologies
The IETF 6TiSCH working group [21] is currently defining the latest component for an open standard-based protocol stack to put together IPv6 technologies with the operational technologies rooted to the time-slotted channel hopping (TSCH) technique and, especially, to IEEE 802.15.4e
Summary
A major challenge to implement distributed sensing applications lays in the selection of the appropriate wireless technology, as the communication requirements are not the same for each application [1,2,3]. ISO 18000-7 is more suited for on-demand data collection scenarios, where the sensors need to be collected at once These protocols have demonstrated the applicability of sensing distributed technologies, but suffer from different problems that limit their applicability, such as low network reliability, due to interferences, and high energy consumption under traffic load, due to channel access inefficiency. To overcome these limitations, new wireless communication technologies targeted at low-power scenarios have been already or are in the process of being standardized.
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