A Dynamic Time Warping Based Method to Synchronize Spectral and Protocol Domains for Troubleshooting Wireless Communication

An increase in popularity of wireless networks, mainly in industrial automation and manufacturing, has escalated the need for reliable wireless networks. One subtle way of achieving reliability is early diagnosis of transmission failures in order to take preventive measures against them. However, this can be difficult to achieve because these failures mainly arise from challenging signal propagation conditions and interference from co-existing networks, which is hard to diagnose. This leads to Quality-of-service (QoS) degradation and faulty applications, which may result in system breakdown and financial distress. In this paper, we propose a novel Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) based method named Variable Adaptive DTW (VADTW) for synchronizing spectral and protocol domains to obtain precise and complete information about collisions and co-existing links that cause interference, which can be utilized for troubleshooting. VADTW divides the spectral and protocol sequences in adaptive time bins and calculates variable window limits for each frame to perform the synchronization, which aims to complement the cross-RF-standard interference detection of the spectral domain with the MAC-Layer information from the protocol domain. To prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we tested it in a Wi-Fi network as a proof-of-concept. The experiments are performed with real-time data traffic captured in different scenarios. VADTW successfully synchronizes sequences even with a frame loss ratio of 50%. We also perform comparative analysis of VADTW with other DTW based approaches on the basis of performance, computational cost, and execution time.