A Novel Approach to Enhance the End-to-End Quality of Service for Avionic Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Going wireless is one of the key industrial trends, which assists the emergence of new manufacturing and maintenance processes by reducing the complexity and cost of physical equipment. However, the adoption of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in production environments is limited due to the strict Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of industrial applications. In particular, Wireless Avionics Intra-Communication (WAIC) systems operating in 4.3 GHz band are designed for intra-aircraft use cases with considerable restrictions on the transmission power of sensors, which results in multi-hop topologies, complicating a guaranteed QoS. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has developed the protocol stack IPv6 over the Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) mode of IEEE 802.15.4 (6TiSCH) based on the IEEE 802.15.4 Standard for Low-Rate Wireless Networks, which combines the TSCH reliability with ubiquitous IPv6 connectivity and with the robust Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). The Scheduling Function (SF) is a core IPv6 over the TSCH mode of IEEE 802.15.4 (6TiSCH) component, but the specification of the SF is an open research topic: numerous scientific articles investigated how QoS for a wide range of applications can be met by developing specialized SFs. However, no full-scale information exchange between the layers of the 6TiSCH stack was considered to optimize the SFs and to improve the network performance. In this work, we propose a novel solution named 6TiSCH-CLX to satisfy demanding QoS requirements using cross-layer communication. It is an extension of the 6TiSCH framework at the network and Medium Access Control (MAC) layers, addressing latency and reliability challenges agnostic of the physical layer. 6TiSCH-CLX is evaluated both analytically and in simulations for several safety-critical avionic intra-communication use cases in WAIC. Preliminary results indicate considerable improvements to latency, while maintaining almost 100% Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) without retransmissions and they highlight the capability of the cross-layer approach compared to existing solutions.