Energy Efficient Determinism in WSN through Reverse Packet Elimination

Sensors (Basel). 2020 May 20;20(10):2890. doi: 10.3390/s20102890.

Abstract

Recently, the industrial wireless sensor network (WSN) has gained attention as a complement to wired networks due to its flexibility and lower installation cost. We present a novel Reverse Packet Elimination (RPE) algorithm implementation at the IPv6 over the TSCH mode of IEEE 802.15.4e (6TiSCH) stack that increases reliability without significantly increasing energy consumption. RPE increases the reliability while conserving energy by transmitting a cancellation packet from the sink towards the sender to reduce unnecessary packets. The evaluation utilized mainly the 6TiSCH Simulator, with additional analytical assessments. We present several evaluation scenarios and compare WSN with and without RPE. In a WSN where each link had a packet reception rate of 70%, RPE increased the reliability with 11.8%. Furthermore, the average latency decreased with 39.1%. The average energy consumption increased with 19.8% when utilizing RPE. However, the network lifetime, i.e., the time before the first node experiences battery depletion increases slightly, which is a significant improvement compared to alternative replication mechanisms.

Keywords: 6TiSCH; DetNet; IWSN; IoT; TSCH; WSN; packet replication.