OSF: An Open-Source Framework for Synchronous Flooding over Multiple Physical Layers

TL;DR

This paper introduces OSF, an open-source framework that enables multi-physical-layer synchronous flooding in low-power wireless networks, dynamically switching PHYs to optimize performance and robustness.

Contribution

OSF is the first framework to support runtime switching between multiple PHYs for synchronous flooding, enhancing network performance and reliability.

Findings

Multi-PHY flooding outperforms single-PHY solutions in tests

Dynamic PHY switching improves robustness and data rate

Open-source implementation available for nRF52840

Abstract

Flooding protocols based on concurrent transmissions are regarded as the most reliable way to collect or disseminate data across a multi-hop low-power wireless mesh network. Recent works have shown that such protocols are effective for narrowband communication not only over IEEE 802.15.4, but also over the BLE 5 physical layers (PHYs). However, to date, existing literature has only built synchronous flooding solutions on top of a single PHY, and there has been no attempt to leverage different PHYs at runtime to increase performance. This paper fills this gap and presents OSF, an open-source framework that enables the design of multi-PHY synchronous flooding solutions thanks to a novel radio driver and middle-ware architecture capable of dynamically switching the underlying physical layer. This allows exploitation of the specific benefits of each PHY (e.g., higher data-rate, increased robustness) on-demand during each flood, increasing performance. We tailor OSF to the off-the-shelf nRF52840 platform, and showcase its benefits by comparing single-PHY and multi-PHY synchronous flooding solutions on a real-world testbed.