Improving Access to Network Resources in IoT Networks

The Internet of Things has made a large footprint in fields like safety, security, healthcare, asset management, environment monitoring and industry automation. The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is a major technology of choice for maintaining connectivity in such applications. The standard has provisions for supporting time-sensitive applications with the help of Guaranteed Time Slots (GTSs) available in the superframe. However, we observe that the standard is slightly ill-equipped for supporting applications that generate time-sensitive and sporadic data as there are concerns related to the manner in which these resources are accessed and reserved for nodes. In this work, we propose a novel “Device Registration” algorithm to address these concerns by making minor modifications to the parameters within the framework of the existing MAC. We divide the Contention Access Period (CAP) into microslots that can accommodate only one registration request which a node transmits if it wishes to communicate time-sensitive data using GTSs. The algorithm discourages reservation of GTS resources to ensure that nodes have a fair chance to allocation of GTS resources. We have evaluated the proposed algorithm extensively using experiments on a testbed with supported simulations. We found that success probabilities of registration requests improve two-fold. Additionally, our scheme lowers the node energy consumption by 10%. To further improve the registration probability, we have studied an extension where the nodes are permitted to transmit the request in two different microslots.