Low-power Wireless Bus

We present the Low-Power Wireless Bus (LWB), a communication protocol that supports several traffic patterns and mobile nodes immersed in static infrastructures. LWB turns a multi-hop low-power wireless network into an infrastructure similar to a shared bus, where all nodes are potential receivers of all data. It achieves this by mapping all traffic demands on fast network floods, and by globally scheduling every flood. As a result, LWB inherently supports one-to- many, many-to-one, and many-to-many traffic. LWB also keeps no topology-dependent state, making it more resilient to link changes due to interference, node failures, and mobility than prior approaches. We compare the same LWB prototype on four testbeds with seven state-of-the-art protocols and show that: (i) LWB performs comparably or significantly better in many-to-one scenarios, and adapts efficiently to varying traffic loads; (ii) LWB outperforms our baselines in many-to-many scenarios, at times by orders of magnitude; (iii) external interference and node failures affect LWB’s performance only marginally; (iv) LWB supports mobile nodes acting as sources, sinks, or both without performance loss.