Performance Evaluation of Thread Protocol based Wireless Mesh Networks for Lighting Systems

Thread is a wireless networking protocol based on existing open standards such as IEEE 802.15.4, 6LoWPAN, and IPv6, and is designed for low power, low data rate and short-range applications. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of Thread protocol for lighting systems using a practical testbed setup in an office area. We focus our evaluation on unicast and multicast, which are the two most important communication paradigms for lighting applications. The unicast and multicast of Thread are tested under various communication parameters, such as concurrent multicast sources, hop distance from the source to the destination, communication interval, etc. The key performance indicators include end-to-end latency, time for complete coverage, synchronization, and packet delivery ratio. In addition, we use the measurement results of unicast and multicast in some typical lighting applications to analyze its impact on user experience. Through our extensive experiment and analysis, we conclude that the performance of Thread multicast and unicast has much leeway to meet the requirements of lighting systems.