Concurrent Transmissions for Communication Protocols in the Internet of Things

Paper i proceeding, 2016

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.