IETF IoT based wireless communication for latency-sensitive use cases in building automation

Wireless communication technology has been widely applied to building automation (BA) industry. A promising evolution direction of wireless building automation (WiBA) is to support native-IP connectivity for all kinds of use cases, including the latency-sensitive use cases. In this paper, a thorough experimental evaluation of a native-IP wireless communication network for BA system with real deployment is presented. IPv6 based low power Internet standards such as 6LoWPAN, CoAP and RPL (so-called IETF IoT) is implemented based on multi-standard wireless platform CC2650 in the experimental evaluation. The experimental results show that the default CoAP retransmission timeout (RTO) is not optimal and leads to a “Stair Effect”, which degrades the performance of latency. Therefore, a solution to improve “Stair Effect” by shortening the CoAP RTO is proposed. Different CoAP RTOs are tested under different cases. The experimental results validate the proposed solution to improve the “Stair Effect”. However, considering improving the overall latency, it should be discussed case by case.

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