Poster Abstract: Towards Worst-Case Bounds Analysis of the IEEE 802.15.4e

Wireless Sensor Networks have been enabling an ever increasing span of applications and usages in the industrial, domestic and commercial domains. Recent advancements in information and communication technologies have been fueling the increasing pervasiveness and ubiquity of this infrastructures, making them an obvious candidate to support the future Internet of Things. Among the prospective applications, however, there are those which present strict requirements in terms of timeliness and reliability, specially in the industrial domain. To address these, the IEEE 802.15.4 standard functionalities were recently enhanced by the IEEE 802.15.4e amendment. Ideas which are prominent in the industrial communication field such as frequency hopping, dedicated and shared timeslots and multichannel communication have been implemented in 802.15.4e. In this line, proposed MAC behaviors such as the Deterministic and Synchronous Multi-channel Extension (DSME) and Time Synchronous Channel Hopping (TSCH), are gaining a lot of attention. Nevertheless, to efficiently address the network demands in terms of latency, resources, and reliability, it is mandatory to carry out a thorough network planning. To achieve this, modeling the fundamental performance limits of such networks is of paramount importance to understand their behavior under the worst-case conditions and to make the appropriate design choices. Network Calculus is an established tool which can accurately compute the worst case bounds of a network. In this paper we provide an insight towards DSME and TSCH by modeling, using Network Calculus formalism, the delay bounds of these MAC behaviors. As a continuation of this work the end-to-end delay bounds will be derived for the rest of the MAC behaviors of IEEE 802.15.4e. Scheduling algorithms will be developed, analyzed and validated as a future work.