Evaluation of CSL-based Low Power MAC Protocol for Wireless Smart Metering Networks

The wireless smart utility network (Wi-SUN) gets attention as one of the promising wireless networks for the machine-to-machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) systems. The resource-limited monitoring and management (RLMM) is a profile of the Wi-SUN for the non-Internet protocol (non-IP)-based networks in resource-poor environments. The coordinated sampled listening (CSL) is one of the IEEE 802.15.4e-based low-power media access control (MAC) protocols, and it is a candidate protocol for the RLMM systems. To construct the CSL-based RLMM systems in a variable environment, the communication characteristics should be evaluated theoretically and experimentally. In this paper, we designed a practical CSL protocol for the implementation, and a theoretical analysis scheme to evaluate communication characteristics of the practical CSL is proposed considering with the effect of Acknowledgement (ACK) frames. Furthermore, the practical CSL protocol is demonstrated experimentally using 30 actual Wi-SUN dongles in a radio anechoic chamber. The proposed theoretical analysis results agree well with not only computer simulation results but also experimental results. It means that the proposed theoretical analysis scheme has high practicality and reliability under actual environments. The experimental and theoretical results show that a high communication success rate of over 90 % can be achieved when the data generation rate is lower than 5.0 × 10−3s−1.