DEterministic Long-range IoT MEsh NeTworks

Faculty Development Competitive Research Grants Program 2022-2024

It has been recently noticed a particular interest in designing new generation networking protocols for Internet of Things (IoT) devices that meet the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of Industry 4.0 applications. These applications often require high degrees of determinism for a number of qualitative network measurements such as the reliability, the delay, and the latency. Determinism is the ability of the network to guarantee a certain minimum (or maximum) allowed value for the aforementioned measurements. Apparently, this allowed value (per measurement) depends on the application requirements. Factory automation applications – such as the control of a wireless robot – require <1 msec synchronization accuracy, a few msec of delay, and >99% packet delivery ratio (PDR) [1]. Other applications – such as the asset tracking or the predictive maintenance – have more relaxed constraints, especially in terms of delay and reliability; a PDR of 90% is usually an acceptable value and the delay can exceed 1 sec. The question that arises is how the required level of determinism can be achieved over large geographical areas that may involve applications with different requirements and often different radio technologies. How popular mid-range IoT technologies such as the 6LoWPAN ones (IPv6 over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Networks – such as the IEEE802.15.4, the IEEE802.11 Halow, and the IEEE802.15.1) can be integrated into a long range carrier mechanism to improve portability and interoperability? Moreover, IoT applications must often support mobility and machine to machine (M2M) communications that currently are not supported by any existing long range protocol. Since the market of Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) and mid-range solutions is well-fragmented (more than 10 wireless technologies available on the market), how a network provider can provide interoperable coverage and seamless connectivity over different network infrastructures without compromising the QoS requirements becomes a hard task.