Boost Your CotS IEEE 802.15.4 Network with Inter-Slot Interference Cancellation for Industrial IoT

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the first successful implementation of inter-slot successive interference cancellation using commercial IEEE 802.15.4 sensors, doubling throughput over traditional contention-based access in industrial IoT settings.

Contribution

It presents the first testbed for inter-slot interference cancellation with off-the-shelf sensors, along with a practical model to predict throughput considering hardware limitations.

Findings

Achieved 0.72 packets per slot throughput, doubling Slotted ALOHA.

Modeled hardware effects that limit interference cancellation performance.

Provided a predictive model for real-world industrial IoT environments.

Abstract

The current cellular standardization for 5G is working towards wireless advances to enable further productivity for industrial automation. However, this development will take several years. Meanwhile, the capabilities of the currently available standards should be pushed to their limits. To this end, in this work, we present results from the first inter-slot successive interference cancellation testbed using commercial off the shelf IEEE 802.15.4 sensors. Through our implementation, we have measured a throughput of $0.72$ packets per slot which doubles the currently used contention-based access, Slotted ALOHA, with a limit of $0.36$ packets per slot. The hardware effects of the boards, which degrade the successive interference cancellation performance from the theoretical limit of $1$ packet per slot, are modeled and validated through measurements. We also propose a model that can be used to calculate the expected successive interference cancellation throughput with the specific hardware available in a factory. Furthermore, our proposed model should replace the perfect physical layer assumptions for researchers to design new MAC algorithms taking practical limitations into account.