On-Demand Scheduling of Command and Responses for Low-Power Multihop Wireless Networks

Many IoT applications require a mechanism to disseminate commands and collect responses over a wireless network in order to control and collect data from multiple embedded devices. However, severe collisions may occur if a large number of nodes attempt to respond simultaneously and promptly, not only among the responses, but also with the dissemination of commands. This is because low-power wireless network protocols for dissemination and collection have been designed separately. Tuning the parameters of one side of the protocol has clear trade-off between reliability and latency. To address this challenge, we propose SCoRe, an on-demand scheme for joint scheduling of command and responses on multihop low-power wireless networks to improve both reliability and latency simultaneously at runtime. SCoRe gathers the amount of time required by network nodes for dissemination and collection, and allocates relative timeslots to each node recursively over multihop on-demand when (and only when) disseminating a command. While doing so, information exchange occurs only between local neighbor nodes without a need for global routing table nor time synchronization. We implement SCoRe on a low-power embedded platform, and compare with well-known dissemination and collection schemes through both simulations and testbed experiments on 30 devices. Our evaluation results show that SCoRe can improve both latency and reliability without tuning the parameters for one metric, while the legacy schemes require careful parameter selection to match only one side of SCoRe, never both.