Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) evolved from a connected toaster in 1990 to networks of hundreds of tiny devices used in industrial applications. Those “Things” usually are tiny electronic devices able to measure a physical value (temperature, humidity, etc.) and/or to actuate on the physical world (pump, valve, etc). Due to their cost and ease of deployment, battery-powered wireless IoT networks are rapidly being adopted. The promise of wireless communication is to offer wire-like connectivity. Major improvements have been made in that sense, but many challenges remain as industrial application have strong operational requirements. This section of the IoT application is called Industrial IoT (IIoT). The main IIoT requirement is reliability. Every bit of information that is transmitted in the network must not be lost. Current off-the-shelf solutions offer over 99.999% reliability. That is, for every 100k packets of information generated, less than one is lost. Then come latency and energy-efficiency requirements. As devices are battery-powered, they need to consume as little as possible to be able to operate during years. The next step for the IoT is to target time-critical applications. Industrial IoT technologies are now adopted by companies over the world, and are now a proven solution. Yet, challenges remain and some of the limits of the technologies are still not fully understood. In this work we address TSCH-based Wireless Sensor Networks and study their latency and lifetime limits under real-world conditions. We gathered 3M network statistics 32M sensor measurements on 11 datasets with a total of 170,037 mote hours in real-world and testbeds deployments. We assembled what we believed to be the largest dataset available to the networking community. Based on those datasets and on insights we learned from deploying networks in real-world conditions, we study the limits and trade-offs of TSCHbased Wireless Sensor Networks. We provide methods and tools to estimate the network performances of such networks in various scenarios. We believe we assembled the right tools for protocol designer to built deterministic networking to the Industrial IoT.

Citation

Brun-Laguna, K. (2019): Deterministic Networking for the Industrial IoT: PhD Dissertation. Thesis of the École Doctorale Informatique, Télécommunications et Électronique (Paris), Université Pierre et Marie Curie.