Novel Extensions to Enhance Scalability and Reliability of the IEEE 802.15.4-DSME Protocol

The Deterministic and Synchronous Multichannel Extension (DSME) of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard was designed to fulfill the requirements of commercial and industrial applications. DSME overcomes the IEEE 802.15.4 limitation on the maximum number of Guaranteed Time Slots (GTS) in a superframe and it also exploits channel diversity to increase the communication reliability. However, DSME suffers from scalability problems, as its multi-superframe structure does not efficiently handle GTS in networks with a high number of nodes and periodic flows. This paper proposes the enhanceD DSME (D-DSME), which consists of two extensions that improve the DSME scalability and reliability exploiting a GTS within the multi-superframe to accommodate multiple flows or multiple retransmissions of the same flow. The paper describes the proposed extensions and the performance results of both OMNeT simulations and experiments with real devices implementing the D-DSME.