Time Slotted Channel Hopping for smart metering: Measurements and analysis of medium access

The paper presents an indoor testbed evaluation of a multi-hop IEEE 802.15.4e Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) sensor network, operating in 2.4 GHz band. First goal of the evaluation is to assess the perspectives of TSCH, as a more reliable version of IEEE 802.15.4, for meter reading applications in a Smart Grid. Secondly, we compare the network performance for two medium access schemes: contention-based and contention-free. We model two automatic meter reading applications, representing regular metering readings and alarm reporting. With this model, we have collected eight measurement data sets for different interference and load conditions. Based on the data sets, link- and end-to-end reliability, and end-to-end delay are analyzed. Our results point out that the delay constraints can be satisfied. However, channel hopping is insufficient for meeting the reliability requirements, and additional mechanisms to couple with high link-layer losses are required.

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