Enabling Direct Message Dissemination in Industrial Wireless Networks via Cross-Technology Communication

IEEE 802.15.4 based industrial wireless networks have been widely deployed to connect sensors, actuators, and gateway in industrial facilities. Although wireless mesh networks work satisfactorily most of the time thanks to years of research, they are often complex and difficult to manage once the networks are deployed. Moreover, the deliveries of time-critical messages suffer long delay, because all messages have to go through hop-by-hop transport. Recent studies show that adding a low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) radio to each device in the network can effectively overcome such limitations, because network management and time-critical messages can be transmitted from gateway to field devices directly through long-distance LPWAN links. However, industry practitioners have shown a marked reluctance to embrace the new solution because of the high cost of hardware modification. This paper presents a novel system, namely DIrect MEssage dissemination (DIME) system, that leverages the cross-technology communication technique to enable the direct message dissemination from gateway to field devices in industrial wireless networks without the need to add a second radio to each field device. Experimental results show that our system effectively reduces the latency of delivering time-critical messages and improves network reliability compared to a state-of-the-art baseline.