From Best Effort to Deterministic Packet Delivery for Wireless Industrial IoT Networks

Wireless industrial networks require reliable and deterministic communication. Determinism implies that there must be a guarantee that each data packet will be delivered within a bounded delay. Moreover, it must ensure that the potential congestion or interference will not impact the predictable properties of the network. In 2016, IEEE 802.15.4 time-slotted channel hopping (TSCH) emerged as an alternative medium access control to the industrial standards such as WirelessHART and ISA100.11a. However, TSCH is based on traditional collision detection and retransmission, and cannot guarantee reliable delivery within a given time. This paper proposes LeapFrog Collaboration (LFC) to provide deterministic and reliable communication over a routing protocol (RPL) based network. LFC is a novel multipath routing algorithm that takes advantage of route diversity by duplicating the data flow onto an alternate path. Simulations and analytical results demonstrate that LFC significantly outperforms the single-path retransmission-based approach of RPL + TSCH and the state-of-the-art LinkPeek solution.