Design and Implementation of Time-Sensitive Wireless IoT Networks on Software-Defined Radio

Time-sensitive wireless networks are an important enabling building block for many emerging industrial Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. Quick prototyping and evaluation of time-sensitive wireless technologies are desirable for research and development efforts. Software-defined radio (SDR), by allowing wireless signal processing on a personal computer (PC), has been widely used for such quick prototyping efforts. Unfortunately, because of the
uncontrollable delay
between the PC and the radio board, SDR is generally deemed not suitable for time-sensitive wireless applications that demand communication with low and deterministic latency. For a rigorous evaluation of its suitability for industrial IoT applications, this article conducts a quantitative investigation of the synchronization accuracy and end-to-end latency achievable by an SDR wireless system. To this end, we designed and implemented a time-slotted wireless system on the universal software radio peripheral (USRP) SDR platform. We developed a time synchronization mechanism to maintain synchrony among nodes in the system. To reduce the delays and delay jitters between the USRP board and its PC, we devised a
Just-in-time
algorithm to ensure that packets sent by the PC to the USRP can reach the USRP just before the time slots they are to be transmitted. Our experiments demonstrate that 90% (100%) of the time slots of different nodes can be synchronized and aligned to within ±0.5 samples or
$\pm 0.05\mu \text{s}$
(±1.5 samples or
$\pm 0.15\mu \text{s}$
), and that the end-to-end packet delivery latency can be down to 3.75 ms. This means that SDR-based solutions can be applied in a range of IIoT applications that require tight synchrony and moderately low latency, e.g., sensor data collection, automated guided vehicle (AGV) control, and human–machine interaction (HMI).