Concurrent Transmissions for Communication Protocols in the Internet of Things

Abstract

Standard Internet communication protocols are key enablers for the Internet of Things (IoT). Recent technological advances have made it possible to run such protocols on resource-constrained devices. Yet these devices often use energy-efficient, low-level communication technologies, like IEEE 802.15.4, which suffer from low-reliability and high latency. These drawbacks can be significantly reduced if communication occurs using concurrent transmissions - a novel communication paradigm for resource-constrained devices. In this paper, we show that Internet protocols like TCP/UDP and CoAP can run efficiently on top of a routing substrate based on concurrent transmissions. We call this substrate LaneFlood and demonstrate its effectiveness through extensive experiments on Flocklab, a publicly available testbed. Our results show that LaneFlood improves upon CXFS - a representative competitor - in terms of both duty cycle and reliability. Furthermore, LaneFlood can transport IoT traffic with an end-to-end latency of less than 300 ms over several hops.