A Robust Setpoint Based Heartbeat Solution for Unreliable IEEE 802.15.4 WSANs

Abstract

Wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) suffer from interference making them unfeasible for actuators that require reliability. This asks for an IEEE 802.15.4 behavior analysis for building automation actuators and a robust WSAN solution. This thesis uses the IEEE 802.15.4 based JenNet communication stack for experiments to define, measure, and create robustness. Failures are classified between soft and hard to identify the impact on the system. Equations are introduced to show the failure probabilities based on packet arrival probabilities. Experiments show the impact of interference on the failure rate with an increased failure rate during office hours, and a ratio between hard and soft failures ranging from 1:5 to 1:25 for single hops depending on the link quality. A setpoint based heartbeat solution is proposed that solves hard failures and copes with soft failures. Equations show the impact of different heartbeat properties on the performance of the heartbeat solution. The solution is implemented and experiments show that it meets the robust properties required by WSANs. To make a WSAN predictable and adaptive to its environment, future implementations could monitor the environment and reconsider timing properties, based on gathered data and hopcount.