Leapfrog collaboration: Toward determinism and predictability in industrial-IoT applications

Recent standardization activities bring high Quality of Service (QoS) and predictability to Internet of Things (IoT), which are “going industrial”. Critical applications such as industrial process control, smart grid or vehicle automation require deterministic transmissions with properties such as on-time data deliveries and end-to-end reliability close to 100%. Traditional radio technologies based on collision detection and retransmission introduce unpredictable delays, and can not ensure reliable delivery within a narrowly bounded time. This paper proposes to exploit spatial diversity and packet redundancy to compensate for the inherently lossy wireless medium. We introduce “Leapfrog Collaboration”, a communication mechanism which takes advantage of communication overhearing, and in which parallel transmissions over two paths are scheduled. Promiscuous listening between the paths enables nodes to possibly overhear transmissions on the other. We evaluate the delay and jitter of the communication by simulation using Contiki OS and show that Leapfrog Collaboration outperforms the default retransmission-based approach of IEEE802.15.4-TSCH by up to 28% and 54%, respectively, while providing high network reliability.