A low power sleepy network design for IPv6-based environmental IoT systems

Abstract

Environmental Sensor Networks (ESN) are widely deployed for monitoring in remote and hazard-ous environments where energy is constrained. ESN nodes are typically battery-powered and are required to operate reliably for long periods. Benefiting from standardisation, the concept of Envi-ronmental Internet of Things (E-IoT) has emerged. Energy-constrained E-IoT systems commonly adopt duty-cycled MAC protocols such as ContikiMAC and 6TiSCH to reduce energy consumption. Although such protocols can effectively reduce the activation time of wireless transceivers, the un-necessary radio activation caused by periodic idle monitoring or frequent network maintenance cannot be further limited. Moreover, once the system is deployed, certain predefined parameters such as the communication rate become difficult to adjust in response to changing environmental conditions or application requirements.

In contrast, schedule-based sleepy networks are designed to maximise the sleep duration of all nodes to conserve energy, while only transmitting data and maintaining the network during sched-uled communication windows. Although extended sleep periods introduce additional communica-tion delays and limit the ability to handle bursts of data, sleepy networks are still suitable for long-term environmental monitoring in remote or hazardous areas. This thesis investigates whether schedule-based sleepy networks can achieve lower energy consumption than systems deploying duty-cycling MAC protocols, and how to optimise communication windows within multi-hop tree topology network to reduce energy consumption. Firstly, through observation of system activities and energy consumption measurements, this work estimates the energy consumption of a sleepy network system in a star topology and compares it with the same system operating under Conti-kiMAC and 6TiSCH.

Secondly, based on scheduling experiments in a tree topology network, this study determined the minimum time required for nodes to complete network maintenance and data transmission after wake-up. Furthermore, in this thesis, an optimised scheme for communication window is proposed, and a corresponding energy consumption model is established to evaluate system energy con-sumption and the impact of other factors on it (such as changes in communication rate, packet re-transmissions, and increases in routing depth).

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Identifiers

ORCID for Jiawei Lu: orcid.org/0009-0003-4326-6722

ORCID for Kirk Martinez: orcid.org/0000-0003-3859-5700

ORCID for Alex Weddell: orcid.org/0000-0002-6763-5460

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