Enabling Reliable, Asynchronous, and Bidirectional Communication in Sensor Networks over White Spaces

Abstract

Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) heralds a promising class of technology to overcome the range limits and scalability challenges in traditional wireless sensor networks. Recently proposed Sensor Network over White Spaces (SNOW) technology is particularly attractive due to the availability and advantages of TV spectrum in long-range communication. This paper proposes a new design of SNOW that is asynchronous, reliable, and robust. It represents the first highly scalable LPWAN over TV white spaces to support reliable, asynchronous, bi-directional, and concurrent communication between numerous sensors and a base station. This is achieved through a set of novel techniques. This new design of SNOW has an OFDM based physical layer that adopts robust modulation scheme and allows the base station using a single antenna-radio (1) to send different data to different nodes concurrently and (2) to receive concurrent transmissions made by the sensor nodes asynchronously. It has a lightweight MAC protocol that (1) efficiently implements per-transmission acknowledgments of the asynchronous transmissions by exploiting the adopted OFDM design; (2) combines CSMA/CA and location-aware spectrum allocation for mitigating hidden terminal effects, thus enhancing the flexibility of the nodes in transmitting asynchronously. Hardware experiments through deployments in three radio environments - in a large metropolitan city, in a rural area, and in an indoor environment - as well as large-scale simulations demonstrated that the new SNOW design drastically outperforms other LPWAN technologies in terms of scalability, energy, and latency.