Time Slotted Channel Hopping and ContikiMAC for IPv6 Multicast-Enabled Wireless Sensor Networks.

Eden Teshome,Matthias Carlier,Kris Steenhaut,An Braeken,Steffen Thielemans,Diana Deac,Virgil Dobrota

doi:10.3390/s21051771

Abstract

Smart buildings benefit from IEEE 802.15.4e time slotted channel hopping (TSCH) medium access for creating reliable and power aware wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs). As in these networks, sensors are supposed to communicate to each other and with actuators, IPv6 multicast forwarding is seen as a valuable means to reduce traffic. A promising approach to multicast, based on the Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is Bidirectional Multicast RPL Forwarding (BMRF). This paper aimed to analyze the performance of BMRF over TSCH. The authors investigated how an adequate TSCH scheduler can help to achieve a requested quality of service (QoS). A theoretical model for the delay and energy consumption of BMRF over TSCH is presented. Next, BMRF’s link layer (LL) unicast and LL broadcast forwarding modes were analyzed on restricted and realistic topologies. On topologies with increased interference, BMRF’s LL broadcast on top of TSCH causes high energy consumption, mainly because of the amount of energy needed to run the schedule, but it significantly improves packet delivery ratio and delay compared to ContikiMAC under the same conditions. In most cases, the LL unicast was found to outperform the LL broadcast, but the latter can be beneficial to certain applications, especially those sensitive to delays.

Highlights

Wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) comprise constrained devices equipped with sensors and/or actuators
RPL [12], a distance routing protocol devised by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for low-power and lossy networks (LLNs), constructs a network topology by forming a destination-oriented directed acyclic graph (DODAG)
link layer (LL) broadcast and LL unicast forwarding are analyzed while considering both ContikiMAC and time slotted channel hopping (TSCH)

Summary

Introduction

Wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) comprise constrained devices equipped with sensors and/or actuators. These devices ( referred to as nodes or motes), which can use radio waves to communicate, are exposed to noise and interference, and they are often powered by batteries. They have limited memory and processing capabilities, and they dispose of limited bandwidth, directly reflected in their networking performance. TSCH, the MAC layer protocol, together with the Orchestra scheduler, assigns cells for each node in the network to forward messages via LL unicast or LL broadcast

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