ISSAC: An Self-organizing and Self-healing MAC Design for Intermittent Communication Systems

Abstract

Recent advancements in Internet of Things (IoT) technology draws attention to Energy Harvesting (EH) systems as a promising energy-efficient solution to the limited sustainability in IoT edge devices. However, due to the weak and unstable nature of the ambient energy source, EH nodes are vulnerable to frequent power outages. Consequently, such outages will, unfortunately, reset the volatile time module onboard, which results in synchronization problems. To enable intermittent communication under energy harvesting scenarios with limited and unstable power supply, instead of merely minimizing the occurrence of a power outage, this work will also enable a smart and swift "self-healing" MAC protocol for desynchronized EH IoT devices to synchronize its timeline with the rest of the network for communication. To demonstrate the effectiveness, we will take the popular Long-range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) communication protocol as the backbone for upgrading, testing, and evaluation. The experiments conducted on LoRa Nodes demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.