Is Link-Layer Anycast Scheduling Relevant for IEEE802.15.4-TSCH Networks?

Rodrigo Teles Hermeto (1) , Antoine Gallais (2) , Fabrice Theoleyre (1)

1 ICube - Laboratoire des sciences de l'ingénieur, de l'informatique et de l'imagerie
2 LSIIT - Laboratoire des Sciences de l'Image, de l'Informatique et de la Télédétection

With the wide adoption of low-power wireless transmissions , industrial networks have started to incorporate wireless devices in their communication infrastructure. Specifically, IEEE802.15.4-TSCH enables slow channel hopping to increase the robustness, and relies on a strict schedule of the transmissions to increase the energy efficiency. Anycast is a link-layer technique to improve the reliability when using lossy links. Several receivers are associated to a single transmission. That way, a transmission is considered erroneous when none of the receivers was able to decode and acknowledge it. Appropriately exploited by the routing layer, we can also increase the fault-tolerance. However, most of the anycast schemes have been evaluated by simulations, for a sake of simplicity. Besides, most evaluation models assume that packet drops are independent events, which may not be the case for packet drops due to e.g. external interference. Here, we use a large dataset obtained through an indoor testbed to assess the gain of using anycast in real conditions. We also propose a strategy to select the set of forwarding nodes: they must increase the reliability by providing the most independent packet losses. We demonstrate using our experimental dataset that anycast improves really the performance, but only when respecting a set of rules to select the next hops in the routing layer.

Mots clés: IEEE 802154-TSCH; anycast scheduling; ex- perimental evaluation; correlation; packet losses independency

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Rodrigo Teles Hermeto, Antoine Gallais, Fabrice Theoleyre. Is Link-Layer Anycast Scheduling Relevant for IEEE802.15.4-TSCH Networks?. 44th IEEE Local Computer Networks Conference (LCN), Oct 2019, Osnabrück, Germany. ⟨10.1109/LCNSymposium47956.2019.9000679⟩. ⟨hal-02336182⟩