Fault-Tolerance Mechanisms for Glossy-based Wireless Communication Networks

Abstract

Flooding-based communication with protocols such as Glossy is being used in- creasingly in low-power wireless communication for multi-hop networks because of its efficiency and reliability. For example, Glossy can achieve packet reception rates above 99.99% in real-life tests. However, faults like interference can still occur, causing a packet to get lost, and, up-to-date, most Glossy-based communi- cation protocols do not take such faults explicitly into account. We address this by using the Low-Power Wireless Bus (LWB), a MAC protocol based on Glossy floods, to design fault-tolerance mechanisms. To this end, we classify the faults that can affect our LWB network, and analyze fault-tolerance mechanisms for data collection and data dissemination applications. We propose two different mechanisms for data collection and present general evaluation results, consider- ing one data-collecting sink as well as multiple (redundant) sinks. Furthermore, we briefly discuss three approaches to fault-tolerant data dissemination. Glossy and LWB are simple protocols with nice statistical properties, which helps to model and analyze fault-tolerance mechanisms independently of network topol- ogy and traffic patterns. Additionally, the proposed mechanisms for data col- lection are able to leverage Glossy and LWB to increase efficiency. This general classification and fault-tolerance mechanisms can be used as a foundation for future analysis of more specific use-cases, e.g. designing a fault-tolerance mech- anism tailored for a specific network topology. Additionally, an investigation on the assumptions we make for our analysis could provide further insight into the modeling of Glossy-based networks.