Élodie Morin - Interopérabilité de protocoles de communication adaptatifs basse-consommation pour des réseaux de capteurs

The growth of various technologies dedicated to sensor networks (WSN) has led to the development of platforms capable of operating in two different technologies, adaptive to transmission contexts. Such platforms open the door to the design of multi-technology networks, which we propose to exploit to reduce overall energy consumption. In order to exploit these multi-technology networks, we describe the main Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, comparing them on an equal footing thanks to the analyzer we developed, and classify them according to the MAC mechanisms they use. We then analyze the link between the application context (latency and frequency of data generation) and the MAC mechanism that consumes the least energy for this application context.

We note that the technologies operating with a synchronous MAC mechanism are the most suitable for periodic application traffic with short intervals between data generation. For these traffic patterns, clock drift leads to extensive traffic overhead because of the need to actively maintain synchronization for sparse periodic traffic.

Moreover, we notice that, in the existing solutions, the management of sparce application traffic management is based on the use of an always-on platform (in reception mode). We thus propose to exploit the multi-technology platforms to build a synchronous network in which each node distributes its activity over time to globally save energy by replacing the role of the always-on platform, while guaranteeing the delivery of the latency-constrained asynchronous traffic.

We notice that during the synchronous network joining phase, the situation of the node attempting to join a synchronous network is similar to the situation of an asynchronous node wanting to deliver data through a synchronous network. Thus, we propose to exploit the synchronous network joining phase to route latency-constrained traffic originating from asynchronous nodes through the synchronous network.

However, the currently standardised network attachment procedures are naïve and energy-greedy, which discourages the use of an asynchronous communication mode, based on a succession of network associations/dissociations: we thus propose two approaches to reduce the cost of the TSCH network attachment procedure.

The first is based on the use of mathematical sequences wich distribute the periods of activity over time, while minimizing the impact on the latency of the procedure, in order to reduce the overall energy cost of the attachment procedure. The second proposed method exploits the acknowledgement frames (ACK) of TSCH data communications to embed the date of the next synchronization frame transmission on the same physical channel as the ACK frame. Thanks to the development of a simulator of the TSCH joining phase, we show that the proposed protocols achieve better performance, either in terms of joining latency, or in terms of overall energy consumption, than the standard joining protocols used in WSN.

Finally, we propose to exploit the mechanisms of the second proposal for sending request frames to a node operating with an asynchronous technology, thus enabling asynchronous traffic to be routed through a synchronous network in bounded latency. We demonstrate the value and feasibility of such a proposal.