Deterministic Synchronous Multi-channel Extension Research Articles

DSME-FOTA: Firmware over-the-air update framework for IEEE 802.15.4 DSME MAC to enable large-scale multi-hop industrial IoT networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly expanding in applications ranging from smart homes and smart cities to various other domains, including agriculture, transportation, industrial automation, and environmental monitoring. Regardless of the application domain, firmware update over-the-air (FOTA) capability is critical for any IoT network, and its importance is particularly evident in the field of industrial IoT. This paper presents a comprehensive solution designed for large-scale industrial IoT networks, with a special focus on Deterministic Synchronous Multi-channel Extension (DSME)-based multi-hop networks, called DSME-FOTA. The paper provides a detailed FOTA protocol design, a numerical analysis, and proof-of-concept experiments. The analytical and experimental results show that the total firmware update time of DSME-FOTA exhibits a first-order dependence on both the number of hops and the firmware binary size.

I-DSME: An industrial-DSME MAC protocol for smart factory automation

Deterministic Synchronous Multichannel Extension (DSME) and Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) are two emerging MAC behaviors that are based on IEEE 802.15.4 and permit the deployment of wireless sensor devices in a variety of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments. While TSCH focuses on multi-channel hopping and fixed-size TDMA timeslots, DSME primarily addresses the drawbacks of the legacy IEEE 802.15.4 MAC, including the best use of the Guaranteed Time Slots (GTSs) and the application of channel diversity techniques. However, the existing literature lack the robustness for an ideal IIoT setup. In this regard, our suggested i-DSME MAC offers the best Quality of Service (QoS), incorporating an effective sensor prioritization strategy and suitable channel assessment techniques. The associated QoS constraints of the sensor devices are also considered by i-DSME in its core methodology, which is not explored adequately in the existing literature. To demonstrate the compatibility of i-DSME’s adaptability with the body of existing literature, we run thorough simulations of it. The results demonstrate that, on average, the proposed MAC protocol is more efficient than the benchmarks in terms of goodput (>39.82%), reliability (>12.50%), packet drop rate (>19.69%), and delay (>54.37%).

DSME-LoRa: Seamless Long-range Communication between Arbitrary Nodes in the Constrained IoT

Long-range radio communication is preferred in many IoT deployments, as it avoids the complexity of multi-hop wireless networks. LoRa is a popular, energy-efficient wireless modulation but its networking substrate LoRaWAN introduces severe limitations to its users. In this article, we present and thoroughly analyze DSME-LoRa, a system design of LoRa with IEEE 802.15.4 Deterministic Synchronous Multichannel Extension (DSME) as a MAC layer. DSME-LoRa offers the advantage of seamless client-to-client communication beyond the pure gateway-centric transmission of LoRaWAN. We evaluate its feasibility via a full-stack implementation on the popular RIOT operating system, assess its steady-state packet flows in an analytical stochastic Markov model, and quantify its scalability in massive communication scenarios using large-scale network simulations. Our findings indicate that DSME-LoRa is indeed a powerful approach that opens LoRa to standard network layers and outperforms LoRaWAN in many dimensions.

Symphony

Deterministic Synchronous Multichannel Extension (DSME) is a prominent MAC behavior first introduced in IEEE 802.15.4e. It can avail deterministic and best effort Service using its multisuperframe structure. RPL is a routing protocol for wireless networks with low power consumption and generally susceptible to packet loss. These two standards were designed independently but with the common objective to satisfy the requirements of IoT devices in terms of limited energy, reliability and determinism. A combination of these two protocols can integrate real-time QoS demanding and large-scale IoT networks. In this paper, we propose a new multi-channel, multi-timeslot scheduling algorithm called Symphony that provides QoS efficient schedules in DSME networks. In this paper we provide analytical and simulation based delay analysis for our approach against some state of the art algorithms. In this work, we show that integrating routing with DSME can improve reliability by 40% and by using Symphony, we can reduce the network delay by 10--20% against the state of the art algorithms.

DynaMO

Deterministic Synchronous Multichannel Extension (DSME) is a prominent MAC behavior first introduced in IEEE 802.15.4e supporting deterministic guarantees using its multisuperframe structure. DSME also facilitates techniques like multi-channel and Contention Access Period (CAP) reduction to increase the number of available guaranteed timeslots in a network. However, any tuning of these functionalities in dynamic scenarios is not explored in the standard. In this paper, we present a multisuperframe tuning technique called DynaMO which tunes the CAP reduction and Multisuperframe Order in an effective manner to improve flexibility and scalability, while guaranteeing bounded delay. We also provide simulations to prove that DynaMO with its dynamic tuning feature can offer up to 15--30% reduction in terms of latency in a large DSME network.

DynaMO—Dynamic Multisuperframe Tuning for Adaptive IEEE 802.15.4e DSME Networks

Recent advancements in the IoT domain have been pushing for stronger demands of Quality-of-Service (QoS) and in particular for improved determinism for time-critical wireless communications under power constraints. The IEEE 802.15.4e standard protocol introduced several new MAC behaviors that provide enhanced time-critical and reliable communications. The Deterministic Synchronous Multichannel Extension (DSME) is one of its prominent MAC behaviors that combines contention-based and contention-free communication, guaranteeing bounded delays and improved reliability and scalability by leveraging multi-channel access and CAP reduction. However, DSME has a multi-superframe structure, which is statically defined at the beginning of the network. As the network evolves dynamically by changing its traffic characteristics, these static settings can affect the overall throughput and increase the network delay because of improper allocation of bandwidth. In this paper, we address this problem, and we present a dynamic multi-superframe tuning technique that dynamically adapts the multi-superframe structure based on the size of the network. This technique improves the QoS by providing 15-30% increase in throughput and 15-35% decrease in delay when compared to static DSME networks.