TDMH: a communication stack for real-time wireless mesh networks

TL;DR

The paper introduces TDMH, a comprehensive protocol stack enabling real-time, connection-oriented wireless mesh networks with bounded latency, path redundancy, and scalable topology management using TDMA scheduling.

Contribution

It presents TDMH, a novel protocol stack combining low power synchronization, constructive interference flooding, and centralized scheduling for real-time wireless mesh networks.

Findings

Scales up to 100 nodes and 10 hops on IEEE 802.15.4

Supports dynamic point-to-point data streams

Achieves bounded-latency communication

Abstract

We present the TDMH (Time Deterministc Multi-Hop) protocol, a complete stack for real-time wireless mesh networks. TDMH offers to applications a connection-oriented, bounded-latency communication model. Point-to-point data streams can be created and destroyed at any time. Path redundancy can be optionally introduced to improve reliability. TDMH exploits state-of-the-art low power clock synchronisation and constructive interference flooding to build a continuously updated graph of the network topology, onto which a centralized scheduler maps data streams using TDMA channel access. We realised TDMH as a unitary codebase, that we ran on both the OMNeT++ simulator and WandStem wireless nodes. As a result we can state that when built atop the IEEE 802.15.4 physical layer, TDMH can scale up to 100 nodes, 10 hops and beyond, despite the limited available bandwidth.