Power-aware Reliable Communication for the IoT
Philipp H. Kindt, Samarjit Chakraborty · 2019
Wireless devices are becoming increasingly pervasive in our everyday life and hence, robust wireless connectivity is a crucial requirement for a host of applications. In particular, with the IoT becoming a reality, an increasing number of wireless devices are frequently brought into their range of reception simultaneously, which need to interact with each other in an ad-hoc fashion. While effective solutions for reliable connected communication exist, establishing a first contact between devices remains the Achilles' heel of mobile wireless devices. For a reliable operation, every device needs to discover all devices in its range within bounded time. Thus, wireless protocols that bound the time within which devices are discovered need to be designed. However, even in such protocols, it is inevitable that a certain fraction of packets sent by multiple devices discovering each other simultaneously collide. As a result, some discoveries fail and a dependable operation can only be realized if the fraction of failed discoveries is kept negligibly low, even in worst-case scenarios. In addition, most devices are battery-powered and rely on a low-power operation for achieving reasonably long battery lifetimes. In this paper, we discuss how wireless protocols can be designed to realize a highly reliable and dependable connection setup, while at the same time meeting the energy-constraints of mobile IoT devices. Towards this, we analyze the challenges in protocol design and discuss which properties of the wireless hardware impact the robustness of the connection setup procedure of IoT devices.