Low-Power Network Design: Work Hard, Play Hard: Data Collection

Abstract

With the rapid expansion of the Internet of Things, an increasing number of applications relies on reliable, energy-efficient, and low-latency communication between small networked wireless devices. A large number of wireless communication protocols dealing with these challenges have been proposed in recent years. Their performance typically varies greatly with the application and environment they are used in. The EWSN Dependability Competition aims to achieve some comparability between solutions by evaluating a protocols under the same conditions. To encourage protocols that are as generally applicable as possible, the 2019 edition introduces some controlled variation to the evaluation conditions. Traditionally, designing and implementing a communication protocol that provides good performance in such a complex scenario required a deep understanding of the entire communication stack used by the nodes as well as a large amount of development time. Our goal in this project is to show that this is no longer the case thanks to Baloo, a novel design framework for communication protocols based on Synchronous Transmissions. We demonstrate this by participating in the 2019 EWSN Dependability Competition with our own protocol based on Baloo, which was developed and implemented within just a few weeks by students with little prior experience in the field of wireless networks. Early testing during the preparation phase of the competition has indicated that our protocol should be able to deliver comparable performance to other competing solutions in terms of reliability, latency and energy consumption across some input conditions.