Adc Paper

Received August 13, 2018, accepted October 11, 2018, date of publication November 9, 2018, date of current version
December 3, 2018.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2879189
Low-Power Wireless for the Internet of Things:

Standards and Applications
ALI NIKOUKAR 1 , SALEEM RAZA1 , ANGELINA POOLE2 , MESUT GÜNEŞ1 ,
AND BEHNAM DEZFOULI 2
1 Institute for Intelligent Cooperating Systems, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, 39106 Magdeburg, Germany
2 Internet of Things Research Lab, Department of Computer Engineering, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA 95053, USA
Corresponding author: Ali Nikoukar ([email protected])
This work was supported by DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) and DAAD/HEC Scholarships.
ABSTRACT The proliferation of embedded systems, wireless technologies, and Internet protocols have
enabled the Internet of Things (IoT) to bridge the gap between the virtual and physical world through
enabling the monitoring and actuation of the physical world controlled by data processing systems. Wireless
technologies, despite their offered convenience, flexibility, low cost, and mobility pose unique challenges
such as fading, interference, energy, and security, which must be carefully addressed when using resource-
constrained IoT devices. To this end, the efforts of the research community have led to the standardization
of several wireless technologies for various types of application domains depending on factors such as
reliability, latency, scalability, and energy efficiency. In this paper, we first overview these standard wireless
technologies, and we specifically study the MAC and physical layer technologies proposed to address
the requirements and challenges of wireless communications. Furthermore, we explain the use of these
standards in various application domains, such as smart homes, smart healthcare, industrial automation,
and smart cities, and discuss their suitability in satisfying the requirements of these applications. In addition
to proposing guidelines to weigh the pros and cons of each standard for an application at hand, we also
examine what new strategies can be exploited to overcome existing challenges and support emerging IoT
applications.
INDEX TERMS Internet of Things, IEEE 802.15.4, Bluetooth, Physical layer, Medium Access Control,
coexistence, mesh networking, cyber-physical systems, WSN, M2M
I. INTRODUCTION
The Internet of Things (IoT) [1] refers to the inter-networking
of everyday objects that are equipped with sensing, com-
putation, and communication capabilities. These networks
can collaboratively interact and perform a variety of tasks
autonomously. IoT promises to play a remarkable role in
diverse application domains, such as smart homes [2], med-
ical care [3], [4], industrial automation [5], [6], intelli-
gent transportation [7], [8], resource management [9], smart
cities [10], [11], and energy management [12], [13], as shown
in Figure 1. For example, in a smart home application,
based on user prescribed settings, different monitoring and
control tasks are carried out by smart sensors and actua-
tors, such as the heating control system, air-condition mon- FIGURE 1. Applications of IoT in different domains.
itoring, and fire alarms. Closely related to the IoT are
Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication [14], Wireless
Sensor Networks (WSNs) [15], Wireless Personal Area Net- The entire vision of the IoT surrounds the concept of
works (WPANs) [16] Wireless Sensors and Actuators Net- communication among smart objects, enabling them to see,
works (WSANs) [17], [18], and Cyber-Physical Systems hear, think, act, and talk to one another to make smart deci-
(CPSs) [19], [20], which are application-dependent terms. sions. It fundamentally embeds intelligence into the objects
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A. Nikoukar et al.: Low-Power Wireless for the Internet of Things: Standards and Applications
by utilizing ubiquitous computing, networking technologies, TABLE 1. Abbreviations.

inter-networking protocols, and applications [21]. Both wired
and wireless networks are utilized to support information
exchange at the backbone and local access networks. The
local access networks, in particular, are wireless, support
multi-hop communication, and enable mobility [22]. As these
networks are usually low-power and unreliable, they are
referred to as Low-Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) [23].
These networks lay the necessary foundation of IoT and
contribute to making it highly accessible. The aspect of ubiq-
uitous accessibility of services and objects to mobile users is
imperative because most of the IoT services are targeted to
mobile users. Another strong aspect is the autonomous oper-
ation, where IoT helps to decentralize the decision-making
process to accomplish autonomous operations with minimal
human intervention. This autonomous feature is of paramount
importance for a multitude of industrial applications that
enable smart processes and systems. This has amplified the
vision of the fourth Industrial revolution, also known as the
Industry-4.0 or smart factory [24].
Although IoT promises to revolutionize several appli-
cation domains and enormously transform the way we
live and communicate, it imposes challenging requirements
from the networking point of view. The first essential
requirement is reliable wireless network connectivity, which
is particularly important for applications such as industrial
process automation and control, healthcare, emergency sit-
uations, disaster recovery, home safety [25]. Second, time-
liness or low latency are requirements that guarantee the
bounded and deterministic delay of data transfer between
different objects so that actions are performed on time. For
example, industrial process control systems require real-time
communication between machines and controllers. Third, the
low-power operation requirement helps the nodes save power
and avoid unnecessary communication attempts, thereby pre-
venting early death and extending network lifetime. All
of these requirements led to the development of several
standards and technologies. These standards propose differ-
ent features and protocols to satisfy the Quality of Service
(QoS) requirements of different IoT applications. However,
the practical use of these standards in different IoT appli-
cations has resulted in several limitations. These limitations
accelerated the need for further analysis in order to seek
viable solutions to meet existing and future demands of IoT
applications. In this paper, we review the existing low-power
wireless standards and technologies. We primarily focus on
the Physical (PHY) and Medium Access Control (MAC) lay-
ers because they directly impact several performance metrics,
such as reliability, latency, scalability, and energy consump-
tion. In this paper:
– We present an overview of some of the active stan-
dardization bodies that are working on the devel-
opment of sophisticated standards and protocols
for IoT.
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– We discuss and analyze several low-power wireless II. STANDARDIZATION BODIES

standards and technologies. The Institute of Electri- A large number of devices from different technologies
cal and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) 802.15.4 stan- and vendors makes the IoT environment quite heteroge-
dard and its derivations such as Thread, WirelessHART, neous, which causes interoperability issues across different
IPv6 over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Network application domains. To meet this challenge, we witness
(6LoWPAN), and IPv6 Over TSCH (6TiSCH) are pre- several standardization bodies that accelerated the devel-
sented. We also study the Bluetooth standard and its opment of low-power wireless standards and technologies.
variants, such as Bluetooth Basic Rate and Enhanced These standards employ unique PHY, MAC, network, and
Data Rate (BR/EDR) and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). application layer enhancements to meet low-power, low-
– Various technologies and standards that share common latency, high reliability, scalability, and security requirements
frequency bands, such as Industrial, Scientific, and Med- of IoT applications. In the following, we describe some of the
ical (ISM), generate severe interference in a coexisting well-known standardization bodies that are actively working
environment. We investigate how the inherent Physical toward developing IoT protocols.
(PHY) and Medium Access Control (MAC) layer design IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) [26] is the most
of these standards and technologies help to cope with well-known standardization organization. It mostly targets
interference issues. the lower layers in the OSI protocol stack, namely MAC
– We explore the suitability of various standards across and PHY. In this paper, we focus on IEEE 802.15.4,
different IoT application domains, such as smart homes, IEEE 802.15.1 (Bluetooth), and IEEE 802.11ah due to their
smart cities, smart healthcare, and industrial automation. low power operation. The IEEE 802.15.4 provides the fun-
Possible limitations of each standard in different appli- damental blocks for many of the key technologies such as
cation domains are also highlighted. ZigBee, Thread, WirelessHART, and ISA100.11a. These
– We emphasize the need to overcome the limitations standards are detailed in Section III. Up to 2017, IEEE-SA
of the existing standards to meet timeliness, reliability, has published more than 1100 active standards, and it has
scalability, and energy efficiency requirements of IoT more than 600 standards under development [27].
applications. ZigBee alliance [28] is an open global standard based on
– We explain how the stringent requirements of IoT IEEE 802.15.4 that is targeted to low-power wireless net-
applications and the constrained resources of objects works. The technical specifications of ZigBee are discussed
introduce severe challenges in terms of protocol in Section III. The most common applications of ZigBee are
design. in home automation, industrial control, and healthcare. They
will be described in Section IX.
The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) [29] is one
In Section III, we discuss IEEE 802.15.4, in particular, of the non-profit organizations that developed IoT standards
its PHY and MAC features. Several standards based on such as 6LoWPAN or Routing Over Low power and Lossy
IEEE 802.15.4 are also presented. Subsequently, we dis- networks (ROLL). IETF encourages more people to commu-
cuss how IEEE 802.15.4e overcomes the limitations of nicate and collaborate on new ideas such as improving the
IEEE 802.15.4. Section IV describes Bluetooth and its radio IoT use cases in smart cities, healthcare, industrial Internet
and link layer working principles in detail. The discus- and other related applications by providing solutions to over-
sion revolves around different versions of Bluetooth such come issues such as scalability, timeliness, and IPv6 adap-
as BR/EDR and BLE. Specifically, we demonstrate the tation for low-power wireless networks. IETF provides a
communication principles in BLE such as beaconing and platform where developers and researchers can collaborate
extended connectivity features. Additionally, we point out the voluntarily to improve and build standards. The standard
limitations of each of the Bluetooth versions. Furthermore, documents provided by the IETF, such as the Request for
we explain the BLE mesh specification. Section V presents Comments (RFCs), can be accessed freely. For example,
the coexistence perspective of different standards and tech- (RFC4944) [30] was developed in 2007 and updated by the
nologies that share the 2.4 GHz band. Other non-standard drafts (RFC6282) [31], (RFC6775) [32], (RFC8025) [33],
sources of interference are also described. In Section VI, (RFC8066) [34] up until 2017 for developing 6LoWPAN
we give an overview of the Z-wave standard. Section VII standards. These documents cover a wide range of topics
examines IEEE 802.11ah, which is another low-power wire- relating to issues of routing, security, and applications in IoT.
less standard operating in sub-GHz. In Section VIII, the Long The European Telecommunications Standards Insti-
Range (LoRa) technology is presented. In Section IX, we dis- tute (ETSI) [35] is another non-profit body (like IETF)
cuss broad applications of IoT and their characteristics, that works for standardization organizations in Europe.
requirements, and traffic categories. We explore the suitabil- It produces globally-applicable standards for communication
ity of each standard relative to these application domains. In technologies for the Internet, such as fixed, mobile, and
Section X we discuss the existing surveys relevant to IoT. broadcast, and short-range technologies. The Third Gener-
Finally, a conclusion is drawn in Section XI. ation Partnership Project (3GPPTM ) is an example of the
VOLUME 6, 2018 67895

ETSI standards. Currently, ETSI has 800 member organiza-

tions from 67 countries.
OneM2M [36] is a worldwide organization formed in 2012
that aims to provide and develop technical specifications
in order to meet architectural, security, and interoperabil-
ity requirements for M2M communication. It targets appli-
cations such as smart cities, smart grids, smart homes,
and healthcare. OneM2M cooperates with more than FIGURE 2. The star and peer-to-peer network topologies supported by
200 companies. the IEEE 802.15.4 standard.
International Society of Automation (ISA) [37] targets
industrial IoT covering applications such as security, safety, TABLE 2. Frequency bands of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard.
batch control, and enterprise integration. A widely-adopted
standard developed by this body is ISA100.11a [38]. ISA has
more than 40,000 members and 140 committees, subcom-
mittees, working groups, and task forces that are working to
develop the ISA standards.
OpenWSN [39] is a project created by the University of
California, Berkeley. It aims to provide an open source plat-
form for developers and researchers to implement the IoT
protocol stack. The stack implements different hardware and
operating systems, such as OpenMote [40] and RIOT [41], standard offers a flexible protocol that tries to achieve a better
respectively. One of the important goals of OpenWSN is trade-off among several performance metrics, such as energy
the adaptation of the Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) efficiency, delay, coverage, and data rate.
concept over IEEE 802.15.4e. TSCH provides the IPv6 sup- The IEEE 802.15.4 network supports star, tree, and peer-
port in the network layer based on the IETF 6TiSCH imple- to-peer network topologies as shown in Figure 2. The network
mentation [42]. We will discuss TSCH in Section III-H. is composed of two types of devices, namely Full Function
Internet Protocol for Smart Object (IPSO) alliance [43] is Device (FFD) and Reduced Function Device (RFD). The
an active organization for enabling Internet Protocol (IP) con- FFDs can perform activities like network coordination, rout-
nectivity for smart object communication in IoT. IPSO was ing, and sensing, whereas the RFDs are constrained nodes
founded in 2008 and targets IoT applications, such as smart that can only serve as end-devices to perform sensing tasks.
cities, home automation, healthcare, and energy management. As coordinators, FFDs can form, manage, and maintain a
Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) [44] developed and Personal Area Network (PAN), but a FFD can manage only
licensed Bluetooth technology. It is a non-profit organization a single PAN at a time. The FFDs can also serve as routers
that was founded in September 1998. This body publishes that relay traffic through intermediate routes from source to
the core specifications for the different version of Bluetooth. destination. They can also store routing tables.
In Section IV, we will describe the different versions of Blue- The following discussion elaborates more on the PHY and
tooth developed by SIG. Currently, SIG is supported by more MAC layer specifications of the standard.
than 30,000 member companies [45]. Although SIG does not
sell any Bluetooth products, it owns the Bluetooth word mark, A. PHY LAYER
figure mark and combination mark, which collectively make The PHY layer uses the 2.4 GHz ISM [54] frequency band.
up the Bluetooth trademarks. Different frequency bands are allocated to different regions,
as listed in Table 2.
III. IEEE 802.15.4 The PHY offers services such as the transmission and
IEEE 802.15.4 [46], which mainly defines PHY and MAC reception of PHY Protocol Data Units (PPDUs) across the
layer specifications, is considered the defacto standard for physical channel. It performs a number of suitable function-
Low Rate Wireless Personal Area Network (LR-WPAN). The alities like the activation and deactivation of radio transceiver,
standard was developed for low data rate monitoring and Energy Detection (ED), Link Quality Indication (LQI), Clear
control applications that require very low power consump- Channel Assessment (CCA), channel frequency selection,
tion. Due to its appealing features such as low-power, low and packet transmission and reception [46].
cost, and moderate data rate, it is the most widely used stan- The purpose of the ED is to estimate the power of the
dard for home automation [47], industrial automation [48], received signal within the bandwidth of the channel so that
[49], smart cities [50], and Wireless Body Area Networks the MAC layer can avoid interference.
(WBANs) [51]. Most of the existing standards, such as Zig- CCA is a reliable method to determine any activity on
Bee [28], WirelessHART [52], and ISA100.11a [53], employ the channel before making a transmission. CCA works
IEEE 802.15.4 as the PHY layer technology together with based on multiple sampling of channel energy. For exam-
certain upper layer modifications. At the MAC layer, the ple, it may sample the channel five times and report a free
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channel if there is at least one sample less than the noise

floor. There are total 27 different channels available across
all of the bands as defined by the IEEE 802.15.4 stan-
dard. For example, the 2.4 GHz band includes 16 channels
numbered from 11 to 25, where each channel has a
bandwidth of 2 MHz and center frequencies are separated
by 5 MHz. They offer an achievable data rate of as much as
250 kbps [55]. IEEE 802.15.4 uses Direct Sequence Spread
Spectrum (DSSS) which mainly supports coexistence by
spreading the signal over a larger bandwidth. FIGURE 3. The superframe structure of the BE MAC mode of
Upon receiving a request from the MAC sub-layer, IEEE 802.15.4 standard.
the radio transceiver may operate in one of the three states:

transmit, receive, or sleep. The energy consumption states
of a transceiver can be classified into the following states: require special bandwidth reservations [59]. Nodes request
transmission, reception, and sleep. During idle listening, the GTSs from the PAN coordinator during the CAP. GTS can
the device is listening to incoming packets, which may result be used either for transmission or reception, and a maximum
in overhearing packets that are not destined for it [56]. It is of seven GTSs are allowed per superframe. During the GTS,
observed that in most of the commercial IEEE 802.15.4 com- the node has exclusive access to the channel at its disposal.
pliant transceivers the energy consumed during idle listening The total duration of the superframe, including active and
is almost the same as receiving or transmitting a packet [57] inactive periods, can be configured through two important
and is a significant cause of energy waste. For example, parameters known as Superframe Order (SO) and Beacon
the TI CC2420 transceiver at 0 dBm output power con- Order (BO). The network coordinator defines the superframe
sumes 17.4 mA in transmission and 18.8 mA in idle listening structure by a Beacon Interval (BI), which is the time between
states [58]. two sequential beacons, and a Superframe Duration (SD),
Since nodes have constrained resources, the IEEE 802.15.4 which is the active duration of the superframe, as shown in
implements duty cycling in the MAC protocol to save power. Figure 3. The values of BO and BI are related as follows [46];
Duty cycling allows a node to sleep by turning off its for 0 ≤ BO ≤ 14
transceivers to conserve energy periodically.
BI = α × 2BO symbols
B. MAC LAYER α is known as aBaseSuperframeDuration, which is the num-
The standard proposes a flexible MAC that can mainly switch ber of symbols forming a superframe when the SO is equal
between two channel access modes known as beacon enabled to zero. The SO defines the duration of the active period
mode and non-beacon enabled mode. including the beacon frame. The values of SO and SD are
related as follows:
1) BEACON ENABLED (BE) MODE
In this mode, communication is based on a superframe struc- for 0 ≤ SO ≤ BO ≤ 14
ture. The superframe starts with a beacon period followed by SD = α × 2SO symbols
an active period and an inactive period, as shown in Figure 3.
The active period consists of the Contention Access Period Therefore, in the case of 2.4 GHz, the value of SD = 15.36 ×
(CAP) and Contention Free Period (CFP), while the inac- 2SO ms with a BI = 15.36 × 2BO ms. Thus, the value of
tive period allows duty cycling. The active period is further BI can be adjusted between 15 ms to 245 s [59], depending
subdivided into 16 equally spaced parts called time slots. on the value of BO and SO.
The superframe information is broadcasted through beacons
at the start of the network. A beacon is a specific frame 2) NON-BEACON ENABLED (NBE) MODE
generated periodically by the PAN coordinator to update syn- No GTS allocation is employed in this mode. Nodes mainly
chronization and other network related information among utilize unslotted CSMA/CA for channel access and perform
the nodes. A superframe is bounded by two beacons. After the only a single CCA operation without synchronization to
beacon, the CAP immediately starts where nodes compete, backoff boundaries [60].
using slotted Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Avoid-
ance (CSMA/CA) to transmit new packets to the coordina- C. LIMITATIONS OF IEEE 802.15.4 MAC
tor or request pending packets. To minimize the probability Although IEEE 802.15.4 MAC has several appealing features
of collisions over the channel, slotted CSMA/CA uses the for general IoT applications, yet it has several limitations
Binary Exponential (BE) Backoff algorithm. After the CAP for applications that require high reliability, low latency, and
is the CFP, which contains Time Division Multiple Access energy efficiency, as pointed out in [61] and [62]. To address
(TDMA) like Guaranteed Time Slots (GTSs) for transmis- this issue, several investigations on the performance analysis
sion. GTSs are allocated by the coordinator to the nodes that of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC were conducted [63]–[66].
VOLUME 6, 2018 67897

Studies in [67] show that the selection of the binary expo-

nent is random and does not take into account the number
of available nodes, the communication activity level, or the
priority of data packets, resulting in a higher likelihood of
collisions. The random nature of the binary exponent causes
nodes to sleep for prolonged periods than required. This
leaves the medium unnecessarily idle for an extended period,
impacting the throughput. FIGURE 4. The mesh networking architecture of Thread.
A simulation-based evaluation of slotted Carrier Sense
Multiple Access (CSMA) for beacon-enabled mode for dense
networks was conducted in [66]. The authors showed that low latency (less than 100 ms) and smart home networking
the backoff algorithm is not flexible for large-scale networks, applications, such as access control, energy management, and
since the lower limit of the backoff delay is always 0 which light control.
is fixed. Thus, it prevents particular ranges for the backoff It does not suffer from a single point of failure due to its
delays. Therefore, it is not sufficient to avoid collisions for mesh networking capability, thus improving reliability.
large-scale networks. The impact on the selection of the BO It natively supports 6LoWPAN technology to benefit
and SO was analyzed based on the average delay. A node that IPv6 capability in order to support interoperability. In this
cannot complete its data transmission in the current CAP is way, devices can be directly connected to the Internet and can
forced to defer its transmission to the following superframe. be accessed from anywhere. Figure 4 shows the mesh network
Therefore, the node has to re-contend to access the medium architecture of Thread. As shown, a typical Thread network
and face collisions. Such a situation makes the delay for the consists of at least one or more border routers, a router,
data transmission not only non-deterministic and unbounded, a leader, sleepy end-devices, and end-devices. The border
but it also deteriorates the throughput. router serves as a gateway that is responsible for connect-
Another study on the performance of slotted CSMA/CA ing a Thread network to an adjacent non-Thread network
for the BE mode was conducted in [63]. The authors showed that operates on other physical layers like IEEE 802.11 or
that the default values of MAC parameters, such as MAC Ethernet. Multiple border routers can be deployed to achieve
minimum binary exponent and number of backoffs, may redundancy. This keeps the mesh network functional in case
result in lower throughput and high-power consumption. This of a failure of the single border router, thereby improving
analytical study was based on the Markov model for both sat- resiliency. A router offers routing services to the network
urated and unsaturated periodic traffic, and it was suggested devices. It also provides security and network joining services
to tune the MAC parameters to achieve better results. for the devices that wish to join the network. A router or bor-
Anastasi et al. [64] gave a comprehensive analysis on the der router can act as a leader which is required to make
MAC unreliability problem. The authors argued that if the decisions for some specific functions like assigning router
power management is enabled, it will result in poor packet addresses and allowing new router requests.
delivery ratio. The reason was found to be the contention Sleepy end-devices can communicate through their parent
access period and its default parameters, such as the minimum router and serve as only host devices, but they cannot for-
and maximum binary exponent value, the maximum number ward messages for other devices. End-devices can exchange
of backoffs, and maximum frame retries allowed. messages with their parent devices. At the application layer,
The authors suggested that the MAC, in its current form, Thread does not impose any particular application layer pro-
is not suitable for mission-critical applications and requires tocol, however, the common light-weight protocols, such as
proper tuning of the MAC parameters for better performance. Constrained Application Protocol (COAP), Message Queue
Motivated by these shortcomings, several relevant stan- Telemetry Transport (MQTT), and Extensible Messaging and
dards and protocols emerged to overcome the limitations of Presence Protocol (XMPP), can be used.
IEEE 802.15.4 MAC [68], [69]. We overview these protocols The standard implements several security enhancements; it
and standards as follows. We will present different applica- supports Transport Layer Security (TLS) [72] and its variant,
tions based on this standard and elaborates further on their Datagram TLS (DTLS) [73]. A network-wide key is used
suitability in each application domain in Section IX. at the MAC that protects the IEEE 802.15.4 data frames
against eavesdropping, tampering, and targeted disruption
D. THREAD from outsiders.
Thread [70] is an open networking stack, which has received Since Thread and ZigBee mostly share the same physical
support from well-known organizations such as Google, Sam- specifications and have several features in common, it is
sung, Nest, Freescale, and ARM [71]. It is built on top of the expected that they are likely to merge in order to create a
IEEE 802.15.4 PHY and MAC layer specifications, operating uniform IoT standard [74]. Although Thread claims to have
in 2.4 GHz band. It is cost-effective, reliable, secure, works all of the features mentioned above, there are no practical
at very low-power, and supports up to 250 devices in a implementations or deployments available based on Thread
single local mesh network. The technology is optimized for standard.
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(DSME-GTSs), which are used to transmit time-critical data.

As mentioned before, nodes remain awake during the CAP;
however, in order to save energy, DSME reduces the num-
ber of CAP periods, and only the first superframe of each
multi-superframe uses the CAP. The rest of the superframes
inside the multi-superframe structure do not make use of the
CAP, but rather the whole period is treated as a CFP that
consists of 15 GTSs, as shown in Figure 3 (Section III-B).
DSME exploits channel diversity to select the best possible
channel in order to ensure reliability and robustness against
external interference and multi-path fading. Therefore, it is
particularly suitable for factory automation, smart metering,
FIGURE 5. The multi-superframe structure of DSME MAC mode with and patient health monitoring.
extended and reduced CAP. The shaded bars show the CFP consisting of
GTSs and the white bars show CAP. (a) DSME multi-superframe with
DSME MAC mode is scalable due to its distributed nature.
extended CAP. (b) DSME multi-superframe with reduced CAP. Specifically, slot allocation and beacon scheduling are not
performed by a central entity, but rather they are performed
by the network devices themselves in a distributed fashion. It
is adaptive to time-varying traffic conditions and to changes
E. IEEE 802.15.4E
in network topology, where each pair of nodes, based on their
IEEE 802.15.4, in its 2011 version [46], supports enhanced needs, allocates and deallocates GTS slots. Due to its adaptive
physical specifications that enable a variety of applica- capability, it can be a good candidate for mobile networks,
tions (see section III-A). However, the standard cannot sup- where data rate requirements and topology vary over time.
port mission-critical applications due to several limitations. It improves energy efficiency through its Group Acknowl-
Specifically, in order to meet reliability, low latency, and low- edgement (GACK) option, where a single Acknowledgement
power consumption, which are the requirements of emerg- (ACK) frame aggregates the acknowledgments of multiple
ing applications like Cyber Physical System (CPS) based data frames.
Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) [75], [76], smart Although DSME MAC presents significant enhancements,
health care [77], and industrial process automation and some of its shortcomings have been identified as follows.
control, IEEE released an enhanced version known as the For example, Rodenas-Herraiz et al. [79] pointed out the
IEEE 802.15.4e [78]. overhead of topology change in large-scale networks. In par-
It specifically introduces five enhanced MAC protocols in ticular, the overhead may be high due to the rescheduling of
the form of MAC behavior modes. These protocols will be beacon frames and/or selection of non-interfering frequency
elaborated in the subsequent discussion. channels, assuming the multi-superframe structure is long
enough and contains superframes of all coordinators. This
1) DETERMINISTIC AND SYNCHRONOUS MULTI-CHANNEL increases the energy expenditure of the devices. On the other
EXTENSION (DSME) hand, in a dense network, DSME incurs considerable delays
DSME is an extension of the beacon-enabled MAC mode due to the TDMA multi-superframe structure, where the coor-
of the IEEE 802.15.4. DSME does not rely on a single dinator and the devices become active only in their respec-
channel. Instead, it uses multiple channels and has a multi- tive superframes. Therefore, if the part of data transmission
superframe structure, which has an extended number of cannot be completed in the current superframe, it needs to
GTSs. A multi-superframe consists of a collection of consec- be deferred to the following superframe. The coordinator and
utive non-overlapping superframes as shown in Figure 5. The its associated devices would have to wait for the next multi-
multi-superframe structure can flexibly support both periodic superframe to resume their transmission.
and a periodic traffic. DSME mainly targets multi-hop net-
works and uses Enhanced Beacons (EBs), which are shown 2) THE LOW LATENCY DETERMINISTIC NETWORK (LLDN)
as black bars inside the multi-superframe in Figure 5. EBs LLDN targets applications that require low latency, such
are used to announce the presence of the network and contain as manufacturing and robotics. It only works with the star
information related to the size of the time slots, slot frames, topology and uses TDMA superframe time slots with small
and time synchronization information to maintain synchro- packets. The duration of the superframe is fixed and has
nization among the network nodes. The superframe consists distinctive slots, namely the beacon, management, uplink,
of only the active period, which is further subdivided into and bidirectional time slots. The duration of a time slot is
CAP and CFP. Nodes in the CAP use slotted CSMA/CA for 10 ms, and the number of time slots determines the num-
channel access to transmit monitoring, urgent, or a periodic ber of devices that can communicate. Since the size of the
data. The CAP is fixed to 8-time slots during which the nodes superframe is restricted to a certain number of time slots,
should stay awake. The CFP occupies the remaining seven it only allows a certain number of devices to participate in
slots that are known as the Guaranteed Time Slots (GTSs) the network.
VOLUME 6, 2018 67899

However, in order to make the network scalable up to

more than 100 devices, the PAN coordinator can use mul-
tiple transceivers that each operate on a different frequency.
Moreover, in order to further reduce latency, LLDN makes
use of short MAC addresses to decrease frame processing
and transmission time. Similar to DSME, it also exploits the
GACK mechanism to minimize the bandwidth overhead. The
use of star topology makes LLDN more suitable for factory
automation, where a large number of nodes often communi-
cate with a central entity. However, it has some limitations in
terms of scalability, topology, and throughput.
The standard recommends using multiple transceivers in
the PAN coordinator to create various networks operating
on different channels. However, a study by Patti et al. [80]
argues that this recommendation imposes a higher cost
and greater complexity. They propose multi-channel LLDN,
which improves scalability by allowing a higher number of
nodes in the network while maintaining low cycle times with-
out the need of multiple transceivers for the PAN coordinator.
Berger et al. [81] indicate that using a star topology restricts
coverage.
They propose the extension of the star topology, which is to
collect data from two-hop sensors with the use of a relay node
strategy. The relay nodes improve transmission reliability by
retransmitting undelivered packets. The authors are of the
view that the use of reserved slots and retransmission strategy
in default LLDN reduces the number of sensor nodes per FIGURE 6. TSCH slotframe schedule based on the associated topology.
network, which impacts data throughput. (a) TSCH slotframe, it also shows sequence of transmission events within
a timeslot for a transmitter-receiver node pair. (b) The associated
topology where dotted arrows show transmission in shared slots and
3) THE Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) solid arrows represent transmission in dedicated slots.
TSCH MAC is considered one of the latest generations of
MAC protocols in the category of reliable and low-power
operation. It aims to satisfy the requirements of low-power modifications. Below, we present an overview of the TSCH
mesh networks in industrial process automation. TSCH is slot frame and its functionality.
considered the most viable MAC candidate for the IoT pro- The earlier MAC protocol of IEEE 802.15.4 (see
tocol stack because of its time and channel diversity fea- section III-B) used a single channel approach in combination
tures [82]. It incorporates mechanisms such as time-slotted with the backoff algorithm in order to avoid collisions in a
access and multiple channel communication with channel shared medium. TSCH takes a multi-channel approach by
hopping. Time-slotted channel access inherently avoids the utilizing channel hopping and maintaining a low duty cycle.
nodes that are competing for the channel, eliminating colli- Channel hopping intelligently mitigates external interfer-
sions and improving throughput. It provides every network ence and multi-path fading [86], which makes TSCH highly
node guaranteed access to the wireless medium, offering reliable and robust. Today, TSCH commercial products
deterministic latency, and builds on a communication sched- offer 99.9% end-to-end reliability while consuming an aver-
ule that coordinates the exchange of information among the age current that is below 50 µA at 3.6 V [87].
nodes. In this way, each node exactly knows when to transmit, TSCH Slotframe: A slot frame combines several time slots
receive, or sleep. TSCH achieves low-power through syn- that repeat periodically, as shown in Figure 6a.
chronization, causing the receiver to be active precisely when Not only does this periodic repetition of slot frame provide
the sender transmits. each node the opportunity to communicate in the network,
The improved design of TSCH is influenced by Time but it also helps to update synchronization and other network
Synchronized Mesh Protocol (TSMP) which is a proprietary related information. TSCH does not define and impose a slot
MAC protocol designed by the Dust Networks [83]. TSMP frame size; instead, the slot frame size is a design parameter
became the widely accepted MAC protocol in the industrial that is decided by the application programmer. The size of the
domain, and in particular, is adopted by WirelessHART [84] slot frame can be from 0 to 1000 time slots [88]. Enhanced
for its MAC operation [52]. Standards like ISA100.11a [53] beacons are sent by the nodes to advertise the network.
and WIA-PA [85] use the core concepts of TSMP in their A time slot is long enough to send a maximum size packet
MAC design, alongside some higher layer packet format and receive its corresponding ACK. A typical value of the
67900 VOLUME 6, 2018

2) PHY AND MAC LAYERS

The PHY layer is based on IEEE 802.15.4 [55].
TSMP is the medium access and networking protocol
which offers reliable, robust, and low-power communica-
tion. It features time synchronized, dedicated time-slotted
access, link layer ACKs, graph-based routing, and multi-
layer security on every packet. It targets reliability of greater
than 99.99% at low-power, scalability of hundreds of mesh
nodes, flexibility to support time-varying traffic, security, and
FIGURE 7. WirelessHART network architecture showing communication the ability to withstand harsh industrial environments [91].
among different kinds of devices. The communication is governed by a time-slotted schedule
which lets the nodes know when to transmit, receive, or sleep.
TSMP follows the same schedule scheme as of TSCH, where
time slot duration is suggested to be 10 ms. If an ACK is the schedule is computed and is represented through cells
not received in a defined time period, the retransmission will using different time slots and channel offsets as described
follow the subsequent time slot that is scheduled for the same in Section III-E3.
(transmitter-receiver) pair of nodes. A possible communica-
tion schedule is depicted in Figure 6a. The slot frame is seven
slots long, and there are sixteen channel offsets available. G. IPV6 OVER LOW-POWER WIRELESS PERSONAL AREA
Each link is assigned a cell. Some of the cells could be dedi- NETWORKS (6LOWPAN)
cated to only one pair of nodes, while others could be shared The underlying motivation to standardize 6LoWPAN [92],
cells, i.e., more than one pair of nodes can communicate in [93] was the need to integrate constrained devices to the
these slots. There could be a possibility of collision in a shared Internet. IETF created the 6LoWPAN and Routing Over Low-
slot, but the standard implements a simple back-off scheme to Power and Lossy Networks (ROLL) [23] working groups with
deal with it. Each node only cares about the cell it is assigned the goal toward standardized IP-based protocols for LLN.
to. For example, in Figure 6a, when node n5 transmits a packet The ROLL focuses on developing routing solutions for LLNs
to node n0 , it uses time slot 3 from the dedicated time slots over IPv6.
and channel offset (Ch.05). The fact that the IPv6 protocol imposes high overhead
and complexity which makes it difficult to be deployed in
F. WIRELESSHART constrained environments, such as the IEEE 802.15.4 net-
WirelessHART [84] is the first open wireless industrial work. Since the MAC payload of IEEE 802.15.4 cannot be
standard, introduced by the HART (Highway Addressable larger than 127 bytes, the 40-byte header of IPv6 does not
Remote Transducer) [89] foundation. It is mainly designed leave much space for actual payload. This prompted the need
for industrial process measurements and control applica- to form an adaptation layer between the network and data
tions while still being backward compatible with the HART link layer in order to enable IPv6 packets to fit into the
legacy systems. It is a mesh network with self-organizing IEEE 802.15.4 specifications. Low Power Wireless Personal
and self-healing capabilities in combination with a secure Area Networks (LoWPANs) impose several constraints, such
and reliable communication protocol. Although Bluetooth as small packet sizes, different address lengths, small band-
and ZigBee were prevalent before the release of Wire- width, high density of nodes, battery operated devices, poor
lessHART, they could not fulfill the stringent requirements link quality, and duty cycling. This makes it challenging to
of industrial control applications [52]. Specifically, neither develop an optimized adaptation sublayer to successfully map
ZigBee nor Bluetooth offered guaranteed end-to-end delay the service required by the network layer on the services
and reliability. provisioned by the link layer [93].
In essence, 6LoWPAN defines an adaptation layer through
1) NETWORK ARCHITECTURE header compression (HC) in order to transmit IPv6 packets
WirelessHART introduces different types of devices in the over the IEEE 802.15.4 network. It supports packet fragmen-
network as shown in Figure 7: network and security manager, tation and reassembly in order to meet the Maximum Transfer
gateways, access points, and field devices. The network man- Unit (MTU) requirements of IPv6, and it allows forwarding
ager is responsible for computing and maintaining the com- to the data link layer for multi-hop connections [94].
munication schedule and routing tables, as well as performing The 6LoWPAN adaptation layer defines two header
the overall network health monitoring. It can query a par- compression techniques that compress large IPv6 headers
ticular field device through the gateway as requested by the (in the best case) to several bytes. The compression
host application. The security manager and network manager technique, 6LoWPAN-HC1, compresses IPv6 packets that
work collaboratively to provide security against intrusion and contain IPv6 link-local addresses. The size of the packet
attacks by generating a different session, joint, and network is minimized by eliminating fields such as IP version, traf-
keys [90]. fic class, flow label, and hop limit. The 6LoWPAN-HC2
VOLUME 6, 2018 67901

connect sensors, actuators, controllers, and critical wireless

infrastructures. Availability is one of the main advantages of
Bluetooth. The Allied Business Intelligence (ABI) research
group predicted that by 2021 there would be 48 billion
devices connected to the Internet, 30% of which would be
Bluetooth enabled [103]. Bluetooth was introduced in 1999,
and the first specification was released in 2001 [104]. In 2002,
FIGURE 8. Envisioned 6TiSCH protocol stack [101].
IEEE assigned the 802.15.1 standard for it [105].
The technology is divided into two major categories:
technique is proposed for the compression of UDP, TCP, First, Bluetooth Basic Rate and Enhanced Data Rate
and ICMP. (BR/EDR) refers to the earlier versions of Bluetooth mainly
The main objective in proposing the HC1 and HC2 tech- designed for file transmission and audio streaming. It is
niques was to perform compression in a stateless manner that reported that in 2015, 116.32 million BR/EDR headsets
did not require any previous agreements between the two were shipped [106]. Second, BLE refers to the recent ver-
nodes. sions of Bluetooth targeting low-power consumption for
IoT applications. Due to the consumer demand for low-
H. 6TiSCH power and high throughput, both BLE and BR/EDR are
IETF formed 6TiSCH [95] working group to support available in some devices like smartphones and laptops. They
IPv6 over TSCH (see Section III-E). 6TiSCH contributes are known as dual-mode Bluetooth and switch the proto-
to the IoT by bonding the unique features of TSCH and col stack from BR/EDR to BLE and vice versa when is
IP networking mechanisms in order to produce an interop- needed [107]. Table 4 highlights the key features of each
erable Industrial IoT (IIoT) protocol stack [96]. This will version.
support TSCH MAC being placed under an IPv6 enabled
protocol stack running 6LoWPAN, IPv6 RPL [97], [98], and A. BLUETOOTH BASIC RATE AND ENHANCED DATA RATE
CoAP [99], [100]. Figure 8 shows the reference protocol stack The first version of BR/EDR was only designed for file
for 6TiSCH [101]. For the successful integration of TSCH sharing by using an Asynchronous Connection-Less (ACL)
with upper layer protocols, 6TiSCH introduces a functional link. The link is a single point-to-multiple point link that
entity that is responsible for scheduling TSCH time slots to can be used for broadcasting data and can support both
be sent on the network. This entity resides at the higher layer asymmetrical and symmetrical connection. The audio stream-
and is known as 6TiSCH Operation Sublayer (6top). ing capability has been added to BR/EDR by using a Syn-
6top is a logical link control that resides between the chronous Connection-Oriented (SCO) link in v1.2. The new
IP layer and the TSCH MAC layer. It controls the TSCH link provides up to three symmetrical point-to-point links
schedule, collects the connectivity graph, and monitors and that reserve time slots in order to guarantee timely trans-
optimizes the schedule of the cells. It supports both cen- mission. To avoid delay in voice transmission, SCO packets
tralized and distributed scheduling approaches. The sched- do not deliver ACKs. In 2003, SIG enhanced the link and
uled cells are labeled as either hard cells or soft cells. Hard released eSCO to improve voice transmission reliability. The
cells cannot be dynamically reallocated by 6top. Rather, they higher quality is achieved by employing a limited number of
are typically scheduled by a scheduling entity such as Path re-transmissions for lost or damaged packets. Additionally,
Computation Entity (PCE), that can move or delete cells in this version employs Adaptive Frequency Hopping (AFH)
the TSCH schedule. In contrast, soft cells can be reallocated to improve coexistence with other wireless protocols [108]
by the 6top dynamically. Typically, a distributed scheduling (Section V discusses AFH in detail). Bluetooth versions up
entity schedules these cells. 6top records the performance of to v1.2 provide a maximum throughput of 721.2 kbps, known
the cells to the same neighbor. If a cell performs poorly com- as Bluetooth Basic Rate (BR). Due to the high demand for
pared to the other cells with the same neighbor, it moves the large file and audio transmission, BR was unable to fulfill
cell to a different channelOffset and slotOffset, where chan- the throughput requirements. Therefore, in 2004, SIG intro-
nelOffset and slotOffset perform better. In this way, the 6top duced Bluetooth v2.0 to improve throughput and named it as
sublayer can cope with the interference reliably. Bluetooth Enhanced Data Rate (EDR). This version increased
the throughput by 2.1 Mbps by using the Differential Phase
IV. BLUETOOTH Shift Keying (DPSK) modulation technique [109]. Although
In this Section, we discuss the history of Bluetooth tech- EDR tries to improve the data rate, it does not satisfy the
nology and technical details such as radio, link layer, and entire user requirements. Thus, in April 2009, SIG launched
network topology. Bluetooth is a low-power wireless tech- Bluetooth v3.0, known as Bluetooth High Speed (HS) [110].
nology used for short-range communication. It was designed Bluetooth HS delivers up to a 24 Mbps data rate by using the
to replace serial cables with the wireless links [102]. Nowa- 802.11 radio. Alternative MAC/PHY (AMP) controller [111]
days, aside from connecting devices like mice, keyboards, changes the radio from BR/EDR to 802.11 and vice versa.
cell phones, headsets, and multimedia devices, it is used to AMP enables the 802.11’s radio when higher throughput is
67902 VOLUME 6, 2018

FIGURE 9. BR/EDR, BLE, IEEE 802.15.4, and IEEE 802.11 sharing 2.4 GHz frequency band.
required. After that, it reverts to primary BR/EDR radio to would be free of noise. In Bluetooth v1.2, AFH added a
save power. technique that blacklists the channels based on traffic load as
good or bad channels. This minimizes the chance of collision
1) BR/EDR RADIO by only performing transmission in the good channels.
The radio operates on the 2.4 GHz ISM band at frequencies
between 2402 to 2480 MHz. It uses Gaussian Frequency 2) NETWORK TOPOLOGY
Shift Keying (GFSK) modulation with three output power In BR/EDR, devices communicate in a network called a
classes: class one has the maximum output power 100 mW piconet. A piconet is a star based topology, in which a node
and achieving communication range 100 m, class two and can only communicate with a central node called master and
class three support output power 2.4 mW and 1 mW, respec- the others are called slaves. In the master node, the built-in
tively. The communication range of class two and class clock is responsible for synchronizing master-slaves commu-
three is almost 10 m. Power classification improves energy nication. The slave nodes receive an inquiry message from
efficiency and avoids interference with other networks by the master node to identify the address and clock phase. With
reducing the communication range. For example, a few meter this information, the slave nodes can compute the channel
communication ranges satisfy the user requirement for Blue- hopping sequence to identify when and on what channel
tooth headphones and a smartphone. Lowering the signal to listen. The slaves can only initiate communication after
propagation range reduces noise for other wireless networks receiving permission from the master node. There are two
in the vicinity. The physical channel is subdivided into 1, types of slave nodes: active and parked. In a piconet, one
3, or 5 time slots; each time slot is 625 µs and Time Division master, up to seven active slaves, and up to 255 parked slaves
Duplex (TDD) provides full duplex transmission. In TDD, can coexist. Therefore, in order to address the active and
both the uplink and downlink can transmit information in the parked slaves, three and eight bits are required respectively.
same frequency by using a synchronized time interval which The master node continuously polls the active slaves to see if
resolves contention over the wireless channel. In BR/EDR, they have data to transmit. If an active slave does not respond
the frequency band is divided into 79 channels, and each to the polling for a long period, it loses its three-bit active
channel is 1 MHz wide. Figure 9(a) shows the channel assign- slave address and becomes a parked slave by obtaining an
ment of BR/EDR. The radio uses the Frequency Hopping eight-bit address. For the parked slaves to rejoin the network,
Spread Spectrum (FHSS) technique to avoid interference the master node periodically checks their status if they have
from any coexisting Bluetooth devices with other technolo- any data to transmit. If so, the master node reassigns the three-
gies that share the same frequency band. In the FHSS tech- bit active slave address.
nique, the radio switches the transmission channels 1600 Since each piconet uses its own frequency pattern that is
times per second; therefore, if a transmission encounters generated by the master node, it would be possible for several
noise on one channel, there is a chance that the next channel piconets to coexist. As shown in Figure 10, neighboring
VOLUME 6, 2018 67903

FIGURE 10. A sample of Bluetooth scatternet formation. Although

Bluetooth is a star-based technology, node role switching enables
connection establishment with other networks in vicinity.
FIGURE 11. Link controller state for BR/EDR designed for communication
piconets can join and construct a new network topology called establishment and power saving.
a scatternet. A scatternet is a combination of two or more
piconets through node sharing. With this, a slave can be
shared by two piconets, or it can be a master in one piconet in order to increase the probability of handshake at the same
and a slave in another. In this way, by combining piconets, time and the same channel. After receiving the ID packet,
Bluetooth can extend the number of nodes in the network. it replies in the inquiry response state with the Frequency
For example, in Figure 10, the nodes are organized into three Hop Synchronization (FHS) packet. The packet contains the
piconets: A, B and C. However, the piconets can communi- node’s address, the clock value, and value used for synchro-
cate with each other using the shared nodes. The shared node nization. After the devices are discovered and the packets
between piconets A and B switches the roles from a slave in A have been exchanged, the connection establishment sub-state
to a master in B and vice versa. On the other hand, the shared starts. This state is much faster than the inquiry state because
node in piconets B and C remain as a slave in both. both devices know each other’s frequency and clock infor-
mation. The previously discovering device changes to the
3) LINK CONTROLLER page state and becomes the master node while the discovered
Bluetooth does not support the OSI model or the TCP/IP device changes the state to page scanning and becomes the
protocol stack because it has its own MAC protocol for com- slave. After defining the roles, the connection state starts.
munication management called the link controller. Figure 11 The master polls the slaves and waits for the response from
shows the state diagram of the link controller in BR/EDR. the slaves. During the connection state, the device can be
There are three primary states: standby, connection, and park. in one of three modes: sniff, active and hold. In the active
The standby state is the default state that waits for the connec- mode, the master node keeps scheduling the slaves by trans-
tion event. It is designed to save power when the connection mitting POLL packets. The packet exchange stops in the
is not required. The connection state is when the BR/EDR hold mode, and the master and slave nodes get informed
radio turns on to discover devices in the vicinity and starts about the duration of time that they need to hold. The sniff
exchanging information if they are ready to communicate. mode is designed to save the battery. In this mode, during
Park mode is a deep sleep mode that helps to save power when the connection the device can be temporarily absent from the
the connection is not required for a long period. Only slaves piconet. For example, a device that is not operating, such as
can switch to this mode. They receive the synchronization a mouse or keyboard, puts itself in sniff mode and transitions
packet periodically, and, once received, they can then join the to the active mode when needed.
network whenever it is needed. Before switching from the
standby mode to the connection state, there are some sub- 4) LIMITATIONS OF BR/EDR
states such as Device Discovery and connection establish- Two major limitations of BR/EDR are high power consump-
ment. The connection establishment sub-state discovers the tion and lack of scalability. Although BR/EDR uses the
devices that are willing to initiate the connection. The Device standby state, parked mode, and effective duty cycling to save
Discovery sub-state has three sections. In the inquiry section, energy, these techniques are not enough to guarantee the low-
the device that attempt to initiate the connection hops among power consumption requirement of some IoT applications.
32 out of the 79 channels, which are known as the inquiry A major disadvantage of BR/EDR is high power con-
channels, and broadcasts ID packets. For channel hopping, sumption. This is because of continuous polling of the
it uses the built-in clock and pseudo-random numbers to slave nodes by the master node in the absence of data
generate the pattern. On the other side, the device that is to transmit. Many studies address this problem and pro-
about to become discoverable switches to the inquiry scan pose scheduling algorithms for polling the slave nodes
state and waits for the expected ID packets in the inquiry such as, [112], [113], and [114]. Chakraborty et al. [115]
channel. It listens for 1.28 s in every channel. It switches the proposed a solution for adaptive polling of slave nodes.
channels slower than the device that broadcasts the ID packet In their method, the master node polls the slave based
67904 VOLUME 6, 2018

on the probabilistic scheduling estimation. This allows a response. On the receiving side, a TV or lamp acts only
the node to reduce power consumption by extending its as a receiver, waiting for a command to act. This results
standby time. Also, in [116], the performance of different in design simplification, yielding higher power efficiency.
scheduling algorithms, such as pure round-robin, gated In December 2013, SIG released the first update (v4.1) for
round-robin, and exhaustive round-robin for polling the the technology [126]. This update can be applied over the air,
slave nodes in BR/EDR have been evaluated using OPNET and no hardware change is required. In the first version of
simulator. BLE, the devices were only able to establish a connection as
The second reason behind the high power consumption master or slave. However, in the new update, the link layer
of BR/EDR is the scanning of a large number of chan- is redesigned and allows devices to switch their roles when
nels (32 channels) for Device Discovery. For example, needed. One year later, SIG made noticeable changes and
Duflot et al. [117] pointed out the issue and proposed a released version 4.2 [127]. In this new update, the actual
probabilistic model to scan the inquiry channels. They also payload size was increased from 27 Bytes to 251 Bytes.
analyzed the power consumption performance of Device Dis- Increasing the payload size while keeping the same packet
covery in the best and worst case scenarios. In [118], the effect format increased the throughput up to 2.6 times more. This
of Device Discovery complexity on power consumption has increase in the packet size also increased the feasibility of
been analyzed. They proposed the adaptive rendezvous proto- IPv6 support. Although version 4.2 does not support IPv6 in
col as a method of optimizing Device Discovery performance. the core specifications, IETF published RFC (7668) [128]
The lack of scalability and mesh networking are other to provide IPv6 support over BLE with the adaptation of
weaknesses of BR/EDR. This version of Bluetooth only sup- 6LoWPAN protocol stack. Bluetooth 5, introduced in Decem-
ports a maximum number of eight nodes, and slave nodes are ber 2016, is the latest version of BLE [129]. Its main aim is to
not able to connect to each other directly because of the star- overcome the limitations of the older versions by increasing
based topology. This standard has been primarily developed the range, size of advertisement payload, and throughput. The
for the scenarios in which a computer plays a master node extension in range provides indoor application coverage and
role, and a limited number of devices, such as a mouse, even enables building-to-building connectivity. In addition,
keyboard, and headset, are connected as slaves. Scatternet is advertisement extension was introduced in this version in
one of the most highlighted solutions for performing mesh order to increase the advertisement payload up to 8 times
networking and improving the scalability of BR/EDR. Scat- more by using data channels as secondary advertisement
ternet is a formation that is not natively supported by the core channels. This opened a new domain of applications for
specification, but there is a huge amount of research that pro- Bluetooth beacons. The last improvement was increasing the
poses scatternet-based solutions or improves on the scatternet data rate by doubling the modulation rate, also called BLE
formation. For example, Jedda et al. [119] mentioned the time high-speed mode. This mode helps lower power consumption
efficiency problem in scatternet formation and proposed an because of the shorter radio operation time that is needed
algorithm to solve this challenge. They also compared the for transmitting the same amount of data. It also improves
performance of other scatternet formation algorithms, such as the coexistence of the technology with other devices through
BlueStars [120] and BlueMesh [121]. In [122], the problem shorter occupancy of air time. An application of this mode is
with scatternet formation, specifically, was that the network over-the-air-update of IoT devices.
overhead was caused by an increased number of bridges that
were switching the piconets. This increases the probability 1) RADIO
of packet loss. Reference [123] analyzed the performance of As Table 4 shows, the general transmit power range in BLE
algorithms for Bluetooth scatternet formation namely, Blue- is between −10 dBm and 10 dBm. However, theoretically,
Trees [124], BlueStars and the BlueNet protocol [125], and version 5 supports output power up to 20 dBm. Similar to
revealed the problem of time-consuming Device Discovery the classic version, the PHY layer in BLE operates in the
in a scatternet network. In general, these works conclude that 2.4 GHz frequency band. In contrast to BR/EDR, it has
scatternet is not a reliable and robust solution for Bluetooth 40 channels, and each channel is 2 MHz wide. Among these
networking, specifically due to the discovery delay and rout- channels, there are three special channels called advertise-
ing challenges. ment channels. As shown in Figure 9(b), these channels are
placed in the center frequency of 2402 MHz, 2426 MHz,
B. BLUETOOTH LOW ENERGY (BLE) and 2480 MHz and are specified with a gray color. The
BLE, introduced by SIG in 2011, was created for low- reason for choosing these frequency centers is to avoid the
power wireless applications that did not require high through- most common cause of interference in the 2.4 GHz, which
put. To achieve low power consumption, the link layer, is IEEE 802.11b/g/n. Since IEEE 802.11 b/g/n channels are
PHY layer, and packet formats were redesigned. In addition, 22 MHz wide, they overlap. Therefore, the conventional tech-
while BR/EDR designed for only two-way communication, nique is to use only none-overlapping channels which are
BLE devices are capable of acting only as either a transmit- channel 1, 6, and 11. Thus, advertisement channels are strate-
ter or a receiver. For example, a remote control only needs gically located in places that have minimum interference
to transmit a short command, and it does not need to receive with non-overlapping channels in IEEE 802.11 b/g/n [130].
VOLUME 6, 2018 67905

FIGURE 12. BLE link layer state has five states: Standby, Scanning,
Advertising, Initiating, and Connection.
Advertisement channels are used for various purposes, such

as Device Discovery, connection establishment, and broad- FIGURE 13. Advertisement and scanning process in BLE. (a) shows the
casting. In BR/EDR 32 channels are assigned for connection advertising device, and (b) shows the process in a scanning device.
initiating which causes significant power consumption and
delay. Where BLE reduced initiating links down to three
advertisement channels that the receiving device needs to non-connectable advertising, connectable advertising,
scan. By limiting the number of channels, connection estab- discoverable advertising, directed advertising, scan
lishment is faster and more power efficient compared to request, scan response, or connect request [133].
BR/EDR. Although both versions use the FHSS and AFH Advertising may result in communication establish-
to cope with interference, only data channels are involved ment or merely broadcasting data. Figure 13(a) shows
in frequency hopping in BLE. Data channels are channels the process in the advertising state. During the
that are reserved for information exchange. Please note that Adv_Interval, devices send the same PDU in the adver-
BLE 5 in advertisement extension mode uses data channels tisement channels (channels number 37, 38, and 39),
as secondary channels for advertisement. Before switching return to the standby state for the duration of Adv_Delay,
to data channels on the sender side, the device sends a special and then repeat the process.
PDU in the advertisement channels and returns to sleep. • Scanning state is divided into two parts: passive scan
In the receiver side, the device listens to these channels to and active scan. In the passive scan, the receiver only
pick up the PDU. Finally, GFSK modulation is used for radio listens to the advertised packets and does not respond.
transmission. The modulation rate is 1 Mbps, except in the In the active scan, the receiver may respond the received
BLE 5 high-speed which is 2 Mbps. packet to get more information in order to make the
connection.
2) LINK LAYER • Initiating happens when the initiator receives the packet
Compared to BR/EDR, the new link layer has been simplified from the advertiser, and it responds to the packets by
to reduce the power consumption and provides a faster con- sending initiating packets.
nection establishment [131]. BLE has only a single packet • Connection is only required when the devices need to
type, instead of the 17 types of packets that are used in the switch to data channels and exchange information. The
BR/EDR. In particular, BR/EDR has a specific packet for- advertising device becomes the master node, and the
mat for different modulations and file or voice transmission, initiating device becomes a slave node. Then, the adver-
on the other hand, BLE omitted the voice streaming capability tisement channels hand over the responsibility to the
and only has GFSK modulation. This simplifies the pro- data channels by employing the AFH. After the connec-
cessing of resource-constrained devices. Connection estab- tion ends, the device is only allowed to transition to the
lishment only requires scanning advertisement channels. standby state.
Subsequently, based on the PDU format received, it either
switches to data channels or receives the broadcast data [132]. C. BLUETOOTH BEACON
Figure 12 shows the state machine of BLE, which has five The idea of Bluetooth beacons was first introduced by Apple
states. and named as iBeacon [134]. A Bluetooth beacon is equipped
• Standby is the initial or default state. This state is with BLE and was designed to be an simple one-way com-
designed to save power, and no sending or receiving munication channel. Due to the low-power consumption of
happens in this state. The device may switch to this BLE, these beacons can operate for several years with a small
state from any other state. For example, after advertising battery. The concept of beaconing in Bluetooth refers to the
device returns to standby mode to save power. periodical broadcasting of small pieces of information, such
• Advertising is the first step for any BLE connection. as sensor data or marketing information. Bluetooth beacons
In the link layer, advertisement channels are respon- have applications in many areas, such as train stations, smart
sible for broadcasting PDUs. Based on the reason parking, and indoor positioning in order to help people by
for advertising, these PDUs are classified as either: providing a platform directly to their smartphones. Currently,
67906 VOLUME 6, 2018

FIGURE 14. Connected region and transitional region in BLE 5 long range.
FIGURE 15. BLE 4.2 and 5 (LE1M, LE2M) packet format.

there are various types of BLE beacons are available in
the market, such as Eddystone [135], which is developed
by Google in 2015. Today, the availability of Bluetooth in higher number of redundant bits makes it easier to recover the
smartphones allows people to interact with the technology bit. There are two options available in version 5 for coding:
easily. The maximum payload size for advertisement chan- S = 8 and S = 2. This means that it replaces a single
nels is 31 B. However, this is only enough to broadcast a short bit with 8 and 2 bits, respectively. This feature increases the
message with a limited number of characters. For example, range up to 4 times and enables Bluetooth 5 to cover an entire
in marketing applications, the packet size is not able to carry house or extended outdoor area. Due to the extra bits added to
enough information to introduce the products. On the other the packet, the actual bit rate per second drops from 1 Mbps
hand, increasing the packet size creates other complications. down to 125 kbps in S=8 and down to 500 kbps in S=2 [143].
For example, [136] shows that increasing the packet size in It is important to note that due to the extra bits, the larger
advertisement channels may result in significant interference packet is more sensitive to interference due to the longer
in dense BLE environments. In Bluetooth 5, advertisement transmission time.
extension provided a solution to this problem.
2) ADVERTISEMENT EXTENSION
D. BLUETOOTH 5 Since only three advertisement channels are available in BLE,
Bluetooth 5 added new features to the previous versions. an increase in the payload size will increase the traffic in
As shown in Figure 9, channel allocation in this version is the these channels. Because of this, advertisement extension only
same as the older versions. However, the maximum transmit uses the advertisement channels to address the next packet in
power increased from 10 dBm to 20 dBm. As mentioned ear- data channels. To initiate this feature, the device sends the
lier, the boldest enhancements in this update are an increase first packet, which includes the pointer to the channel that is
in range by employing Forward Error Correction (FEC), randomly selected from the 37 data channels. The randomly
utilizing advertisement extension by using the data channels selected channel is known as the secondary channel for adver-
as secondary channels, and increasing the throughput by tisement. Figure 15 shows the packet format in advertisement
doubling the modulation rate [142]. We explain these features channels and the data channels. The transmitted packet in
as follow. the main advertisement channels has a maximum payload
of 37 B; however, the secondary advertisement channels can
1) BLE CODED AND FEC carry up to 255 B in their payload. Furthermore, it is also pos-
One of the major issues in IoT devices is the range limitation, sible to extend the payload by adding the next packet address
and Bluetooth-enabled devices are not an exception. Gen- and making a chain for data streaming applications. Before
erally, common solutions for range extension are mesh net- this, frequency hopping was only applied in the connection
working and increasing transmission power. Mesh network- mode. Since the data channels are randomly selected as the
ing and IPv6 extend communication range by routing packets secondary channels in advertisement extension, the receiver
to reach their destination. This causes network traffic and needs to know the channel number and time to listen. There-
consumes power from other nodes as well. On the other hand, fore, the primary packet broadcasted by the advertisement
increasing transmission power to achieve more extended channels must contain the hopping pattern. Marco et al. [144]
point-to-point connectivity causes higher power consumption performed a simulation experiment to evaluate the perfor-
in the transmitter. To avoid these problems, the FEC feature is mance of service ratio, communication delay, and battery life,
added to BLE. Typically, wireless propagation of waves (tran- when advertisement extension is used. They claim that adver-
sitional region) is much longer than the connected region. tisement extension offers better performance compared to
In BLE connected region is where the acceptable Bit Error the connection-oriented and the basic advertisement in BLE
Rate (BER) in the receiver side is less than 10−3 bits. For concerning the factors above. However, they also pointed out
example, in Figure 14, node C can receive the signals from the issues of higher losses, in comparison with connection
node A. However, due to path loss and interference, bits are mode, and latency, compared to the basic advertisement.
corrupted, and data is not reliable.
In FEC, several bits represent a single bit. If the receiver 3) BLUETOOTH 5 2 Mbps
bits get corrupted, it can identify and recover these bits based In BLE 5 increasing the speed is an optional mode known
on the pattern that represents each bit. Therefore, using a as 2 Mbps version. This mode only operates on data channels
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TABLE 3. Bluetooth 5 support SoC comparison.
and increases the throughput by doubling the modulation rate.

One of the applications for this mode is upgrading the IoT
device’s firmware over the air. In this case, higher speed helps
saving energy by reducing the duty cycle, besides, shorter
over the airtime minimizes the probability of the collision
with other operating networks in the frequency band. Please
note that BLE 5 maintained the 1 Mbps as the default mode
to support backward compatibility with the older versions.
Because every packet transmission requires a gap called
Inter-frame Space (IFS) between packets and ACK to guar-
antee a successful transmission, the actual throughput in BLE
is less than the modulation rate. In BLE IFS is defined as
150 µs for all the versions, but packet transmission and ACK
periods vary based on the modulation rate. For example, FIGURE 16. BLE packet transmission.
as shown in Figure 16 although the packet size in v5 2 Mbps

has one more octet, the transmit time is almost half of the applications, such as in smart homes and industrial automa-
v4.2 and v5 1 Mbps. This also explains the shorter period tion, where scalability is a major issue.
for ACK. Packet_Transmission_Time = (Packet_size × 8)/ The new software stack supports the BLE versions
Modulation_rate, however, in order to achieve the actual 4.0 through to 5. The more nodes joining the network,
data rate only the payload of the packet has to be consid- the more robust and reliable the network will be due to the
ered. Therefore, the actual throughput can be computed by nature of mesh networking and the ability to have multiple
Equation (1). available paths for routing. Nodes in Bluetooth mesh are
Lpayload divided into several types. The first type is the low-power
Throughput = (1)
Tframe + IFS + ACK + IFS nodes that mostly rely on battery power [151]. They have
Where, Transmit_packet + IFS + ACK + IFS are in µs and the responsibility of transmitting or receiving information and
Payload is in bits. From the Equation, it can be observed that going back to sleep for the defined period. Another type is
the actual payload for v5 2 Mbps is (251 × 8)/(1064 + 150 + called the friend nodes. They are mostly connected to the
40 + 150) = 1.4Mbps. Consequently, v5 2 Mbps is 1.7 and main power grid. Due to the lack of power limitation, they can
4.6 times faster than v5 1 Mbps/4.2 and 4.0/4.1 respectively. perform more complex tasks. Friend nodes store the incoming
message for low-power nodes. BLE shares the radio and link
E. BLUETOOTH MESH layer with Bluetooth mesh in order to adopt any BLE-enabled
Draves et al. [148] showed the importance of mesh net- devices to work with mesh networking.
working over WPAN. Although Qualcomm introduced a pro-
prietary Bluetooth mesh known as CSRMesh [149], in the F. LIMITATIONS OF BLE
official Bluetooth mesh specification was later released by Although BLE has many benefits, such as low-power con-
SIG in July 2017 [150]. Prior to this, Bluetooth suffered sumption, beaconing, and availability in many devices, there
from shortcomings such as a single point of failure, limited are some issues associated with it. It still needs to rely on dual-
network size, and range extension. Bluetooth mesh allows mode devices and BR/EDR for audio streaming and bulky file
3200 nodes to operate in a network. It enables a wide range of transmission. There are studies in which researchers tried to
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TABLE 4. Comparison of Bluetooth Standards.
implement audio transmission over BLE. Gentili et al. [152] 2.4 GHz frequency band being more crowded. Due to the
introduced BlueVoice and examined the feasibility of voice massive proliferation of IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11 net-
transmission over BLE. They also mentioned the require- works, the possibility of interference would deteriorate
ments, such as using 64.3 kbps bandwidth to transmit voice application-specific QoS parameters. These networks exist in
quality of 16 kHz. In their experiment, they measure the large numbers today and operate in close proximity to a num-
power consumption, memory, and processing requirements. ber of application domains. Suitable interference avoidance
Another limitation is the lack of seamless IPv6 connectiv- solutions need to be adapted in order to maintain the required
ity in the core specification. This leads to a dependency of service.
BLE on other networks like Wireless Local Area Network As presented in Figure 9 the different wireless technologies
(WLAN) or LTE to translate the Bluetooth packets to IP pack- operating in the 2.4 GHz band. In Figure 9(a), BR/EDR is
ets [131], [153], [154]. For example, a BLE-enabled smart- operating between 2402 MHz to 2480 MHz. It divides the
watch is unable to transmit heartbeat information directly frequency into 79 (1 MHz wide) channels and uses AFH
to the Internet. It has to be done in two steps. First, this to avoid collisions. Figure 9(b) shows BLE, which has 40
information has to be forwarded to a smartphone. Then, channels that are 2 MHz wide and also uses AFH. The only
the smartphone converts the BLE packet to an IP packet to be difference is that the advertising channels (specified with
routable over the Internet and transmits it via WLAN or LTE. the gray color) have the responsibility of initiating the con-
nection in connectable mode, and they are not involved in
the frequency hopping. As mentioned in Table 4, to achieve
V. COEXISTENCE IN 2.4 GHZ SPECTRUM
longer coverage, the maximum transmit power in BLE 5 is
Wireless networks are susceptible to radio interference. The
increased from 10 dBm to 20 dBm, compared to the earlier
impact of interference becomes even more deteriorated if
version of BLE. Figure 9(c) shows channel assignment for
they operate in the same frequency band because it causes
the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. Channels from 1 to 10 for the
disruptive effects in the transmission [155]. Interference
868 −868.6 MHz and 902 −928 MHz bands are defined for
can cause packet loss, latency, jitter, false alarms, and
lower frequency ranges, whereas the channels from 11 to 26
synchronization errors [155]. All of these adverse effects,
are operating in 2.4 GHz band. Each channel is 2 MHz wide,
in particular, cause severe problems for mission-critical appli-
and the center of each channel is 5 MHz apart. Figure 9(d)
cations. As the 2.4 GHz band is unlicensed globally, many
depicts the channel assignment of the IEEE 802.11b stan-
technologies use this band for their devices throughout the
dard in the US. There are 11 channels, each 22 MHz wide.
world, thereby, making the band more crowded. In 2003,
These channels overlap with each other, and in the best case
the IEEE 802.15.2 task group [156] published standards for
scenario, we can only have three non-overlapping channels:
the coexistence of WPAN with other wireless networks. How-
channel 1, 6, and 11. However, the IEEE 802.11 standards
ever, raising awareness of the new techniques and technolo-
have several versions, and the channel assignment differs in
gies do not solve the entire coexistence issue.
some countries.
The problem of coexistence among BR/EDR, BLE,
IEEE 802.15.4, and IEEE 802.11 networks is causing
major difficulties in terms of delay and power consump- A. COEXISTENCE OF IEEE 802.15.4 AND IEEE 802.11
tion in IoT networks. The issue of coexistence has got- IEEE 802.11, more widely known as WiFi, is the ubiq-
ten further momentum due to the fact the emerging stan- uitous technology defining standards for WLANs. Today,
dards like WirelessHART, ISA100.11a, and IEEE 802.15.4e WiFi devices are everywhere, and they are causing
share the same license-exempted ISM band, resulting in the severe interference with IEEE 802.15.4 networks. Unlike
VOLUME 6, 2018 67909

IEEE 802.15.4 devices, IEEE 802.11 devices operate at a channels. ISA100.11a employs adaptive frequency hopping
high transmit power, high data rate, and long range. Since using slow hopping, fast hopping, and a hybrid combination
they are unable to sense IEEE 802.15.4 devices, they create of both.
strong interference with them. In terms of channel bandwidth, Although these techniques avoid interference to some
both IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11 channels are asym- extent, the rising penetration of these networks in different
metric, i.e., each IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11 channel domains prompts the need for more advanced and sound
has bandwidth 5 MHz and 22 MHz, respectively. This causes interference avoidance techniques in order to help these
overlapping of the four IEEE 802.15.4 channels, as shown technologies coexist constructively. Especially for mission
in Figure 9. In most cases, IEEE 802.15.4 is vulnerable to critical applications, the issue of interference in a coexisting
interference [157], however, in certain cases, it does cause environment becomes more challenging due to the real-time
interference [158]. characteristics of these applications which always require
In order to improve network performance and support bounded latency and high throughput.
coexistence, these technologies inherently utilize specific The issue of coexistence between IEEE 802.15.4 and
techniques that help to promote coexistence. For example, IEEE 802.11a/b/g has been discussed in [157], [158],
IEEE 802.15.4 employs a number of inherent mechanisms and [160]. For instance, in [160], it is shown how
such as DSSS, CSMA/CA, CCA, low transmit power, low severely an IEEE 802.11 network can interfere with an
duty cycle, channel alignment, ED, and LQI as explained in IEEE 802.15.4 network and degrade its performance. This
Section III. DSSS promotes coexistence and protects against performance degradation can lead to adverse consequences
interference by spreading the signal to a wider frequency for application QoS requirements. For example, consider a
through chipping code. Chipping code is achieved by map- fire detection application based on IEEE 802.15.4. If there is
ping the bit pattern of the signal into a higher data rate bit a substantial packet loss due to massive IEEE 802.11 inter-
sequence. As the signal is spread over a larger bandwidth, ference, the fire extinguisher may not trigger within the
the narrowband interferer blocks a small overall percent- set latency bounds, leading to catastrophic consequences.
age of the signal. The receiver is able to easily recover the Angrisani et al. [155] experimentally studied the coexis-
signal [159]. CSMA/CA works on a ‘‘listen before talk’’ tence of ZigBee and WLAN. The experiment was con-
principle, where the transmitting devices PHY continuously ducted by varying different characteristics, such as packet
samples the channel and notifies the receiving device when it size, packet rate, and SINR, under different topologies. The
is clear to transmit. In this way, it is less likely to cause colli- authors confirmed that ZigBee and WLAN could coexist
sion and interference with other signals. The radio turnaround but to the detriment of packet loss rate and throughput.
time for IEEE 802.15.4 is 192 µs, while the turnaround time Guo et al. [161] conducted experimental tests to assess
of the DIFS (Distributed Interframe Space) of IEEE 802.11 is the interference from an IEEE 802.11 transmitter, Blue-
50 µs. This can cause IEEE 802.11 devices to easily preempt tooth transmitter, and microwave ovens sources on the link
the channel access while the IEEE 802.15.4 device is still in reliability of IEEE 802.15.4 devices. Through their results,
the process of radio state switching. Acknowledged transmis- the authors show that these interference sources (ISs) cause
sion and retries further ensure reliability, where the receiver significant packet error rate (PER). The value of PER varies
acknowledges a successful data reception. If the receiver does from 2% with no IS to an upward 25% depending upon the
not send an ACK in a stipulated time, the sender assumes distance between receiver, transmitter, and IS.
failure and retransmits data by using its retry limit. This
can be particularly useful when the IEEE 802.15.4 device B. COEXISTENCE OF BLUETOOTH WITH OTHER
is encountering interference when coexisting with Blue- WIRELESS TECHNOLOGIES
tooth. Bluetooth may interfere with the first transmission, After version 1.2, Bluetooth employed AFH with the pseudo-
but then it would hop to another channel. A retry helps random FH technique. As random frequency hopping suf-
the IEEE 802.15.4 device to make a successful transmis- fered from certain complications, such as repeating the trans-
sion on the second attempt. However, studies in [160] show mission in busy channels. Pust and Burda [162] performed a
that the timing mechanism employed in CCA mechanism of comparison between the FH and AFH mathematical models
IEEE 802.15.4 is much longer than that of IEEE 802.11 b/g, and proved that AFH has a better performance in avoiding
and it causes IEEE 802.15.4 to be in an adverse situation in interference. The basic idea of AFH is to classify the channels
terms of channel access competition. as good or bad channels. Nodes are only allowed to transmit
IEEE 802.15.4e TSCH mode uses channel hopping to in good channels. To avoid interference, AFH restricts trans-
promote coexistence. Every transmission happens on a dif- mission on busy channels by labeling them as bad channels.
ferent channel. This helps to further counter the effects Transmission in a good channel helps Bluetooth to estab-
of interference from other co-located networks. Likewise, lish a reliable connection and leave busy channels for other
WirelessHART utilizes channel hopping in combination with technologies. However, the number of channels should not
channel blacklisting to deal with interference effectively. be less than a specific number. Otherwise, the good chan-
With this method, a channel that is continuously causing nels would be more sensitive to interference. For example,
transmission problems is eliminated from the list of available in BR/EDR, the good channels can be reduced down to only
67910 VOLUME 6, 2018

20 channels [163]. In AFH the device is not aware of the other 2.4 GHz (model dependent). Results show that the radiation
devices and their transmission status. In order to identify the from microwave ovens that operate in the vicinity of WSN
traffic condition in a channel for classification, there are two networks can cause up to 92% packet loss [171] in WSN.
main methods: Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) This increases further interference for wireless networking
and the Packet Error Rate (PER) [164]. Channel noise is devices in the 2.4 GHz band. Kim et al. [160] investigated
one of the factors which has an impact on signal strength. the coexistence of WLAN and ZigBee networks in the pres-
In the RSSI technique, the receiver side measures the signal ence of microwave ovens. The experimental results show
strength and informs the transmitter about the channel con- that the microwave oven is a dominant interferer and it
dition. On the other hand, in PER, the transmitter measures significantly increases ZigBee’s PER. Rondeau et al. [172]
channel noise based on the number of lost packets. In order analyzed the characteristics of microwave ovens and their
to update the channel map, the validity of classification needs effect on BR/EDR. The experimental results show that the
to be checked periodically. Apart from all of the benefits AFH mechanism enables BR/EDR to be able to tolerate a
of the AFH, there are also disadvantages to its use. For high level of interference at a distance of one meter.
instance, in order to check the channel quality over time, Cordless phones are available almost everywhere. Most of
AFH has to periodically scan and classify the channels, which them operate in the 2.4 GHz band like microwave ovens. They
increases the duty cycle. Moreover, reducing the number of use DSSS or FHSS to overcome interference and achieve
available channels may cause more sensitivity to interference. better voice quality. Generally, the DSSS method changes
Lee and Lee [165] simulated packet delivery ratio perfor- the channel manually, while the FHSS method automatically
mance in BR/EDR by combining AFH and adaptive transmit changes the channel. Similar to microwave ovens, the fre-
power. They considered an environment with IEEE 802.11b quency range and the technique used in these devices are
and a number of BR/EDR piconets. They compared the pro- model dependent, and there is no global standard for them.
posed method with the basic AFH in term of interference
mitigation in different distances. They showed that adaptively VI. Z-WAVE
controlling the transmit power significantly decreases the Z-wave is a low-power wireless technology that is specifi-
PER. Another study in [166] analyzed the impact of inter- cally designed for control applications in residential areas.
ference of other sources on BLE and ZigBee. The authors It supports full mesh networking. The technology was devel-
monitored the power consumption of BLE and ZigBee and oped by Zensys, which is a company for home automation
showed that BLE is more energy efficient in terms of the applications such as Heating, Ventilation, and Air Condi-
number of transmitted bytes per Joule. The study presented tioning (HVAC), Smart Lighting Control (SLC) and access
in [167] tested the performance of BLE. They analyzed the control [173]. The main feature of the Z-wave technology
probability of BLE network failure in different environments is that it operates in the sub-1 GHz band, which allows the
and presence of interference. The results showed that, with signal to avoid any interference with the 2.4 GHz working
the use of AFH, BLE has a lower probability of failure even technologies. Moreover, it has the advantage of full interoper-
in high interference. Bronzi et al. [168] presented the appli- ability with other z-wave enabled devices compared to other
cation of BLE for robust Inter-vehicular communications. wireless technologies. This means regardless of product type,
They examined the impact of IEEE 802.11g on BLE. The brand and manufacturer all Z-wave devices are able to join
experimental results showed that BLE can be a reliable solu- one network and help grow the mesh network. For example,
tion when compared to IEEE 802.11p if the high data rate is a BLE enabled thermostat from one company might not con-
not required. The performance of the advertisement channels nect to BLE smart sensor with other brand but in the Z-wave
in BLE was analyzed in [136]. Based on the experiment, network, all the devices are cooperating with one another. The
in a dense environment, authors claimed that when multiple standard is proprietary and is available under a non-disclosure
devices are scanning in the same channels, it is not feasible to agreement. The point-to-point communication range between
increase packet size to above 31 bytes for the advertisement nodes is about 30 meters.
channel. The PHY layer in Z-wave is designed for remote control
applications, where most of their requirements are just a
C. OTHER SOURCES OF INTERFERENCE single end-to-end message. For example, turning on and off a
Microwave ovens use electromagnetic waves in the 2.4 GHz light requires a very low data rate. The technology operates in
band. Although they are covered by a Faraday cage, the 908.42 MHz band in the US and the 868.42 MHz band in
there is still some leakage that occurs around the doors. Europe, employing the Frequency Shift Keying (FSK) modu-
These waves increase the motion in water molecules and lation. By operating in this band, Z-wave avoids collision in
heat up food [169]. According to the US Department of 2.4 GHz frequency band. The radio has a data rate of up to
Energy (DOE), more than 90% of houses have microwave 40 kbit/s [174].
ovens [170]. They also share the same spectrum and cause In the MAC layer, Z-wave uses the CSMA/CA. The re-
interference for networking devices based on WLAN, Blue- transmission technique is based on ACKs. There are two
tooth, and IEEE 802.15.4. Microwave ovens normally gener- types of Z-wave devices: controller and slaves. The controller
ate 60 dBm signal power and operate in a different range in has the responsibility of initiating the control commands and
VOLUME 6, 2018 67911

sending them to other nodes. On the other hand, slave nodes TABLE 5. Worldwide availability of IEEE 802.11ah frequency range [177].
are responsible for replying and executing the commands. It is
also possible for the slave to forward the command to other
nodes. A Z-wave network can support 232 nodes, including
multiple controllers [175]. The controller node, which creates
the Z-wave network, becomes the primary controller. There
is only one central controller in a Z-wave network. The other
controllers are the secondary controllers. Controllers can
communicate with all the slaves. However, just the primary
controller can add and remove the nodes from the network.
Aside from the controller, there are some slave nodes in a provide a coverage range up to 1 km. However, employing all
Z-wave network that are only responsible for performing an the channels in different regions is not possible because of
action or routing the controller’s messages. the licensing limitations. Table 5 shows the global available
unlicensed bands in sub-1 GHz with Emitted Radiated Power
VII. 802.11AH (ERP) and Channel Bandwidth (CBW) [178].
WLAN is a worldwide available technology. However, this
technology suffers from a limited range and high power con- B. MAC LAYER
sumption, which are key elements in IoT. In October 2013, The IEEE 802.11ah MAC layer is designed to support scal-
IEEE P802.11-TASK GROUP AH [176] provided the stan- ability while keeping the power consumption low. Theoret-
dard specification over WLAN to overcome these limitations. ically, the standard is able to support up to 6000 nodes.
In the specification, MAC and PHY are inherited from IEEE In order to support this amount of connected nodes to a
802.11ac. Additionally, sub-1 GHz frequency operation is single AP, IEEE 802.11ah uses the Restricted Access Window
added to provide better coverage, obstacle penetration, and (RAW) mechanism. An AP defines RAW by first grouping
lower power consumption. As explained in Section V, most the clients. The RAW is a time slot assigned to a group and
of the wireless technologies opt for operating in the unli- the AP. The group is only allowed to communicate in that
censed 2.4 GHz band. This makes the frequency band more specified time slot window. In each group, nodes are compet-
and more crowded. Operating in sub-1 GHz is an advantage ing for channel access. Up to 64 slots are supported [179].
for IEEE 802.11ah to avoid interferes in the 2.4 GHz fre- In addition, IEEE 802.11ah introduced Target Wake Time
quency band. On the other hand, while technologies such as (TWT) to save power. TWT assigns access time to the clients
Bluetooth and ZigBee are targeting WPAN, IEEE 802.11ah that need to wake up and access the channel. Clients and the
aims for up to 1 km coverage to be used for applications AP exchange information about the channel access time and
in Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN). Adaptation connection duration.
of IEEE 802.11ah in smart homes, wearables, agriculture
monitoring, animal tracking, industrial automation, and smart VIII. LoRa
cities eliminates many existing wireless communication limi- LoRa is a radio frequency transmission method for wide
tations. For example, a smartwatch can directly communicate area network applications. It was developed by Cycleo of
with an IEEE 802.11ah Access Point (AP) to transmit the Grenoble and acquired by Semtech [180]. It is a low-power
information without needing to connect to a smartphone, or a and low data rate technology that covers up to 10 kilometers
single AP in a smart building can manage all the connected for wireless communication. It operates in the sub-1 GHz
devices. spectrum and follows the previously mentioned unlicensed
band for every region in the world (see Table 5). The fre-
A. PHY LAYER quency band is divided into 8 or 15 channels, depending
As discussed above, IEEE 802.11ah, like IEEE 802.11ac, on the operation region. The transmission power is limited
employs Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing from 2 to 14 dBm in Europe and from 5 to 20 dBm in
(OFDM) modulation in order to achieve high through- the U.S. LoRa has three bandwidth classes for communica-
put and more extended coverage among low-power wire- tion: 125, 250, and 500 KHz. Although high bandwidth has
less networks. The difference between IEEE 802.11ac and the advantage of high data rate, it consumes more energy,
IEEE 802.11ah is that the channel widths are ten times reduces the communication range, and increases the possibil-
clocked down. Instead of 20, 40, 80, and 160 MHz in ity of interference due to operating in the broader spectrum.
IEEE 802.11ac, IEEE 802.11ah uses 2, 4, 8, and 16 MHz in In LoRa, modulation is based on spread-spectrum techniques
addition to an extra 1 MHz channel to extend the range. The and a variation of Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS). In par-
1 MHz and 2 MHz bandwidths are intended for applications ticular, it has the spreading factor (SF) of 7 to 12, which
that require low data rates and power, such as WSN. Further- represents the number of bits encoded per symbol. The larger
more, a new modulation and coding scheme, MCS10, has SF increases the transmission range in the expanse of higher
been designed for the 1 MHz channel. MCS10 is more reli- power consumption. The CSS does not distinguish the noise
able than the other modulation and coding schemes, and it can in the channel like DSSS or AFH, but it has the advantage
67912 VOLUME 6, 2018

of using the entire allocated bandwidth, making it resistant

to channel noise, Doppler effect, and multi-path fading. Nor-
mally, FSK modulations can only detect signals that are 8 to
10 dB above the noise floor, however, using CSS features
enables the LoRa to detect signals that are 19.5 dB below the
noise floor. Together with CSS LoRa uses FEC for error cor-
rection with the code rate of 4/5, 4/6, 4/7, and 4/8 to increase
the robustness of the channel. More redundancy bits for error
correction helps to extend the range and robustness of the
link by recovering the corrupted bits that are caused by path
loss or interference. However, the overhead consumes more
energy. The LoRa network architecture uses the star-of-stars
topology, which consists of end nodes and gateways. End FIGURE 17. LoRaWAN communication classes.
nodes are usually battery powered devices and act as slave
devices, while gateways are potent devices that are connected
to AC power source and are responsible for collecting the data extended sleep period. Meanwhile, it is not suitable for
from the end nodes. In the LoRa network, several gateways real-time applications. This class is mostly used for non-
can receive the information that is transmitted by the end critical sensors with long battery life requirements.
node, and multiple receptions increase the reliability of the • Class B is designed for applications with more frequent
network. connectivity requirements compared to class A. This
Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) is a layer class is a combination of class A and C. Devices in this
on top of the LoRa that defines roles for communication class wake up whenever the gateways have information
introduced by the LoRa Alliance [181]. It is one of the most to transmit. A beacon that is transmitted by the gateway
adopted, low-power wireless technologies for low data rate schedules the wake-up time for the end node. Frequent
and long-range connectivity. It has advantages over cellular access ensures the connection establishment when it
technologies, since cellular technologies are battery hungry is required, however, the overhead due to the beacons
and not suitable for low-power applications. For example, and the frequent wake-up time reduces the battery life.
a soil moisture sensor in agricultural monitoring needs to Valves for irrigation are one of the examples of uses
sense the humidity level every few days, and the battery has cases for devices in this class.
to last for a few years. LoRaWAN extended the network • Class C is normally implemented in devices that are
functionality by adding a network server and defining differ- connected to an AC power source, where energy con-
ent device classes for each application. The network server sumption is not a concern. In this class, devices are
is responsible for managing the communication, filtering continuously listening to the channel, except when they
the multiple copies from one packet received by different are transmitting information. Therefore, they are ideal
gateways and scheduling the communication. For example, for real-time applications. Devices such as street lights
the network server decides the gateway that should commu- that are connected to the AC power are an example of
nicate with certain end nodes and when to change the data this class and can act as gateways as well.
rate. LoRaWAN has a bidirectional-employing adaptive data
rate and transmission power. This adaptive control optimizes IX. APPLICATIONS
the power consumption and performance of the network. As In this section, we present an overview of the important
presented in Figure 17 LoRaWAN has three device classes IoT applications in the home, healthcare, industry, and city
that are specified for each application. domain. These applications utilize different wireless tech-
• Class A is the default class and uses pure ALOHA to nologies and standards. First, we summarize the requirements
access the link for transmission. In this class, the end of each application and their traffic characteristics. Second,
node wakes up periodically and transmits a packet. we discuss the suitability of each wireless standard pertaining
Then, it waits for the downlink to respond in the same to each type of application. We critically point out the stan-
channel and the same SF. If it does not receive the packet, dards that are suitable for each application category. Addi-
it waits for the second packet in a different frequency and tionally, we identify the drawbacks of each standard based
with different SF. After receiving a response from the on the requirements of the applications.
gateway, the end node switches to sleep mode. On the
gateway side, the device is only able to transmit infor- A. SMART BUILDING
mation once, exactly after receiving the packet from the The basic goal of a smart building is to provide a better
end node. Therefore, if the gateway needs to send more living environment in order to make our life more comfortable
than one packet, it has to wait for hours or days to send and more efficient while also making it safer and pleasant.
the next packet in the queue. This class has the advantage It is reported that we spend more than 87% of our time
of having the lowest power consumption due to the in indoor environments, including home and commercial
VOLUME 6, 2018 67913

buildings [182]. In 2016, the global market for smart homes

was valued at $39.93 billion and predicted to reach up to
$79.57 billion by 2022 with a Compound Annual Growth
Rate (CAGR) of 11.3% [183].
However, the concept of the smart building is not only
about controlling lights or other devices with voice com-
mands or a simple point to point remote control. The
main idea is to have an Ambient Intelligence (AmI) using
M2M communication in order for a device in the building
to make smart decisions based on real-time conditions [184].
According to Gartner, a typical family home will have
500 smart devices by 2022 [185]. This future requires a scal- FIGURE 18. Comparison of major wireless technology demands for smart
home predicted by 2018 (The CAGR is from 2016 to 2021) (source: [186]).
able wireless technology. As we discussed in Section V, with
the increasing number of smart objects that communicate
with each other using the same frequency band, interference TABLE 6. Smart building requirements and available technologies.
becomes a severe issue.
Furthermore, issues related to Internet connectivity, mobil-
ity, availability, energy consumption, and reliability need to
be addressed. There are many consumer-oriented IoT smart
home applications. Some of the major use cases and their
communication requirements are discussed below.
One of the common use cases in buildings is
Smart Lighting Control (SLC) that provides more comfort
and convenience for the owners and has a direct impact
on saving cost and energy. The Gartner’s report estimated
that SLC cloud reduce the energy cost by 90%, and its
market will grow from 46 million units in 2015 to 2.54 billion
units in 2020 [187]. SLCs are performed by employing
relays, motion sensors, daylight sensors, timers, dimmers, but they also have direct impacts on people’s well-being.
and switches. In order to perform efficient wireless control- Smart controlling of HVAC requires employing smart ther-
ling for this hardware, it requires mobility and scalability. mostats, control valves, heating and cooling coils, dampers,
For example, a large number of lamps or LEDs may exist and actuators, pumps, fans, and vents. In order to access HVAC
need to be accessible from different locations of the building. from anywhere, the timers, sensors, and actuators are required
The mesh networking capability can support these to increase to be connected to the Internet and support scalability.
the coverage. A person who is moving in the building must Interoperability is desirable among sensors and actuators
be able to access the lights. from different vendors in order to collaboratively communi-
Another key use case is the privacy and safety of the cate to make decisions. For example, a central heating or cool-
buildings. A typical solution for providing safety in buildings ing system must be able to collect information about window
is the use of video surveillance. However, many users are shades, humidity, temperature, or absence of residents.
reluctant to surveillance cameras because of privacy con- Entertainment is one of the more compelling applications
cerns, installation costs, lack of real-time responses, power in smart buildings and homes that covers the access of mul-
consumption issues, and massive storage requirements. timedia contents such as music and home theaters. These
A better alternative to video surveillance is to use low- applications require high throughput for streaming audio and
cost and low-power sensors that are able to detect and per- video contents on the go. Since these devices rely on batteries,
form actions immediately and prevent disasters. For example, they require low-power consumption.
in the case of a fire in the building, smoke detectors can Figure 18 shows the forecasting provided by ABI research
reliably prevent hazardous situations in a promptly manner. for the future of wireless technologies in smart homes [190].
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, The numbers prove that technologies like WiFi and Bluetooth
Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) is the dual mode will have less share of the market, and low-
largest contributor to the energy bills in a home. It contributes power and low rate devices will be more desired. Table 6
to 48% of the total energy consumption of U.S. homes [188]. summarizes the general requirements and shows the major
In many cases, the cost of power consumption changes based technologies that support these requirements in smart build-
on the operation hours. Consequently, load balance control- ings. A detailed discussion about smart building requirements
ling systems can help in scheduling the operation during off- is presented in [191].
peak periods [189]. The benefits of using smart HVAC are not BR/EDR and BLE are available technologies in almost
only limited to providing comfort and a pleasant environment, every smartphone, laptop, and tablet. This feature enables
67914 VOLUME 6, 2018

smart buildings to be controlled using these devices. Statis- scalable network architecture that incorporates reliability and
tics show that nearly 73% of people would like to receive adaptivity. ZigBee enables a variety of smart home applica-
smartphone alerts from their home security system [192]. tions by connecting the sensors and actuators. Additionally,
Compared to other low-power technologies, this availabil- ZigBee is a low-power wireless standard that allows the
ity along with lower-power consumption are advantages for battery to operate for several years. It can also run without a
BLE. As shown in Figure 18, it can be predicted that the battery by utilizing harvested energy. For example, a keychain
BLE market will surpass other technologies. BLE’s AFH flashlight gets its power by a simple push of a button.
algorithm and usage of advertising channels have reduced Internet connectivity is one of the significant characteris-
interference with most of the common operating wireless tics of an ideal wireless network for home automation appli-
technologies in the 2.4 GHz band, such as IEEE 802.11. cations. Although ZigBee natively does not support Internet
This feature makes BLE a suitable option for an environ- connectivity in the protocol stack, the 6LoWPAN technology
ment that is full of wireless devices that operate in that adopted the IPv6 connectivity based on the 802.15.4 stan-
band. The aforementioned features also help to reduce battery dard [47]. This adoption allows the nodes to be independent
consumption and provide reliability. By increasing the range of the translation gateway in order to access the Internet.
up to four times more in Bluetooth 5, the signals can cover Compared to Bluetooth, the main limitations of ZigBee-
an entire building. For example, the user is able to access based smart buildings are the lack of support by smartphones
the door lock from anywhere in the building. Another advan- and the low communication throughput. Similar to Bluetooth,
tage of BLE is the recently added mesh networking feature, there is an ample amount of research that has been done on
which increases the network scale, reliability, and coverage. the application of ZigBee in smart buildings [205] [206].
Countless amounts of research has been done on Bluetooth Zigbee also has products on the market that are used
applications in smart buildings [193]–[196]. For example, for smart building applications. Companies such as Con-
Putra et al. [197] compared the energy consumption of trol4 [207] and Phillips Hue [208] are designing their prod-
WiFi and BLE devices in smart home applications. The ucts based on ZigBee technology.
result showed the possibility of occupancy data transmission Thread is a recently developed wireless technology tar-
via BLE with 30% less battery consumption. Aside from geted for home automation. It is IPv6 enabled and sup-
academic publications on the application of BLE in smart ports mesh networking, thereby all devices can be addressed
buildings, there are some companies such as UniKey [198], locally or globally. Mesh networking support allows the
BOLT [199], and Emerson [200] that are working on home network to cover the entire building, and it improves the
automation devices based on Bluetooth. Beaconing is one of robustness of the network and avoids issues such as single
the unique features of BLE that is used in many applications, point of failure. SLC is one of the main applications of a
such as indoor positioning. For example, by tracking the users Thread network, and scalability is one of the requirements
inside the building, the AmI can perform desired actions for the SLC applications. A Thread network supports up to
like turning on or off the lights or playing one’s favorite 200 connected nodes. In addition, operating on MAC and
music [201]. As shown in the Figure 18, the Bluetooth bea- PHY layers of IEEE 802.15.4 allows the technology to get
con market will have the highest market compared to other the benefit of low-power consumption.
Bluetooth-enabled technologies in 2021. While Bluetooth In addition to Bluetooth and ZigBee, several proprietary
has its benefits, it does have some limitations that are asso- standards target building automation applications. Standards
ciated with it. For example, there is a lack of scalability such as Z-wave [209], INSTEON [210], and EnOcean are
support in BR/EDR and IPv6 connectivity in both BLE and particularly designed to meet the requirements in home
BR/EDR [202]. Incorporating other technologies with Blue- automation applications. Z-Wave specifically targets control
tooth will increase the demand. applications such as SLC and access control. A thermostat
ZigBee is another candidate for smart home applications. is one of the examples of these applications and has over
One of the major advantages of ZigBee is that as an open 2100 certified products. The products are supported by 600
global wireless standard, it provides the open source software companies like Intermatic [211], Hawking Technology [212],
stack for developers to freely access the network and appli- Wink [213], and Aeotec [214]. As previously mentioned in
cation layer. It employees mesh networking to eliminate the Section VI, Z-wave has the advantage of using the sub-
single point of failure and expand the reach of the network. 1 GHz frequency band. However, this can also be a disad-
Additionally, in the star topology in WLAN, sharing a single vantage when the products need to be distributed globally
node between a large numbers of connected devices has the and used in other countries that have different rules for
problem of increasing the delay in the entire network. The operating in the sub-1 GHz band. INSTEON Alliance was
ZigBee network supports more than 400 connected nodes, launched in 2005 by Smartlabs company [215]. The tech-
which will be necessary for the future of smart homes, based nology combined powerline and wireless mesh technology.
on the Gartner report’s prediction. With mesh networking Devices can support wireless technologies, wired technolo-
increasing the number of the devices, the robustness of the gies, or both. Wireless devices use FSK modulation and
network is also increasing due to redundancy and decentral- operate at 904 MHz with a data rate of 38.4 kb/s [216], [217].
ization [204]. A self-organizing network is optimal for a more INSTEON has applications in SLC, thermostats, smart
VOLUME 6, 2018 67915

FIGURE 19. Comparison of major Bluetooth applications market predicted by 2021 (source: [203]).
sensors, and remote controls. EnOcean [218] is a wireless to the need to provide an advanced healthcare system for diag-
technology developed for smart homes and standardized by nosing, treating, and preventing disease. The desired system
the international standard ISO/IEC 14543-3-10 [219]. It aims must be inexpensive, accessible, harmless, reliable, and must
to use harvested power sources from the environment for not restrict the daily activities, mobility, or quality of life.
wireless technology [220]. Devices such as smart plugs, SLC, IoT, in combination with medical engineering, has the
and HVAC can be controlled by EnOcean. Like Z-wave and great potential to provide this system through wirelessly
INSTEON, it operates in the sub-1 GHz band with a data rate monitoring and recording medical data. Providing the Inter-
of up to 125 kbps. net connectivity allows the physician to monitor the health
condition of the patients. Thus, 41% of the IoT is marketed
for healthcare applications by 2025 [228]. There are a large
B. SMART HEALTHCARE number of researchers who are focusing on the cure, preven-
Improving the health quality for individuals prompts a need tion, and prediction of diseases using IoT and wireless tech-
to provide advanced systems for diagnosing, treating, and nologies [229]–[232]. In IoT-based healthcare systems, smart
preventing diseases. A robust healthcare system can be homes can replace hospitals, and bulky, attached-to-the-body
divided into two generally classified categories: prevention monitoring systems can be changed to tiny, implanted sen-
of illness and post illness monitoring. Monitoring the blood sors. Table 7 shows the QoS requirements for a wireless
pressure, Electrocardiogram (ECG), Electroencephalogram network, including the data rate, timeliness, acceptable error
(EEG), Electromyogram (EMG), glucose level, cholesterol rate, and required battery life.
level, pulse oximetry, and toxins in the body can help early- It is important to provide a platform that does not limit the
stage detection in order to prevent fatal diseases, such as can- normal activities and quality of life of patients. For example,
cer or heart attacks [221]. The rapidly increasing population bulky attached sensors that are connected to wires are hard
and longer life expectancies raise the importance of mech- to carry and restrict the mobility of a patient [25]. Besides,
anisms for children and elderly health monitoring, artificial providing Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is important in
organ implementation and drug delivery. According to the monitoring health conditions. Smart homes or smart hospi-
World Health Organization (WHO), global life expectancy tals are examples of AAL. For instance, a smart home can
increased from 66.4 years in 2000 to 71.4 years in 2015 [222]. receive the information from the wearable sensors of the
As the global life expectancy is increasing, the size of the patient in order to manage the temperature. Wireless sensors
geriatric population is also increasing. The number of people can be placed inside or outside of the body as wearables.
over 60 years old increased from 607 million to 901 million These sensors can detect changes faster than highly equipped
by a 48% increase. Also, it is predicted that by 2030, this num- laboratories, especially for people who have a history of
ber will grow by 56% to 1.4 billion and reach to 2.1 billion cancer or other diseases which can be inherited. However,
in 2050 [223]. It is also clear that the risk of chronic diseases this constant monitoring leads to high battery consumption.
like neurological conditions, diabetes, heart diseases, and This increases the risk of nonavailability of these sensors
strokes increase with age. The other concern is the cost of in critical moments. Latency in bio-medical sensor applica-
healthcare, which can include hospitalization, home nursing, tions is soft real time. Normally, in critical scenarios such
and medicines. It is estimated that in the U.S., healthcare as during a heart attack, a few seconds of latency is still
expenses are more than $2 trillion annually [224]. This leads acceptable.
67916 VOLUME 6, 2018

TABLE 7. QoS requirements for smart healthcare (sources: [225]–[227]).
In [233], they implemented real-time and low-power ECG health records in the cloud. 6LoWPAN-based real-time health
and EEG Bluetooth based sensors. They introduced the com- monitoring is proposed in [244]. They tested the performance
pressed sensing method, which saves the battery up to 37.1% of ECG monitoring sensor data for remote healthcare using
more. In [234], the feasibility of applying dual mode Blue- a 6LoWPAN edge router. Doukas and Maglogiannis [245]
tooth in vital monitoring was analyzed. Authors implemented presented the cloud platform in which sensors are connected
the ARM CPU based sensors, such as ECG, body temper- to the Internet using 6LoWPAN technology.
ature, and motion sensors. Reference [235] reviewed the
available commercial Bluetooth-based healthcare devices in C. INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION
the market, which are composed of sensors such as activ- During the last decade, wireless technology has been increas-
ity tracking, ECG, EEG, EMG, and glucose monitoring. ingly utilized in industries, leading to the Industrial Internet
A BLE-based ECG monitoring using a smartphone is imple- of Things (IIoT), where Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks
mented in [236], and the result shows that power consump- (IWSNs) play a central role of behaving like a digital skin for
tion is highly reduced. In addition to reducing power con- the IoT. IWSNs can monitor critical parameters and control
sumption, an equally important aspect of using sensors is industrial processes and then inform the industrial personnel
that the patient is being continuously monitored in both of this information promptly. IWSNs offer flexibility, self-
indoor and outdoor locations like their home, hospital, and organization, rapid deployment, and low-cost. They have
outside. Elderly patients are penitent when they feel that the ability to make processes autonomous, resulting in the
they are in danger and need to be continuously monitored. minimal human intervention [246] when compared to their
Reference [237] proposed a BLE-based indoor positioning wired counterpart. The shift from wired to the wireless net-
system for patients who have Alzheimer. works dramatically helps to reduce huge capital expenditures
There are several commercial products like wearable of installation and maintenance of wires. Moreover, wired
devices on the market. Jawbone [238], Apple Watch [239], networks are rigid and fixed in nature. This makes it difficult
Samsung Gear [240] and most of the smartwatches are using to adapt to changes in industrial environments. In addition,
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technology to send the health sensor certain industrial applications require mobile robots, which
information. Heart rate monitoring with ECG, activity track- becomes a huge challenge with wired networks. However,
ing, sleep monitoring, and other forms of health data are wireless networks can easily support such mobility scenar-
implemented in these wearables. ios. Although IoT seems to revolutionize the industries, it is
However, Bluetooth is not the only low-power wireless only if it satisfies the strict requirements and challenges
technology for healthcare applications. ZigBee and 6LoW- that are put in place by the industrial applications. Such
PAN are other candidates in this area. In [241] and [242], challenges include: extremely high reliability, low latency,
ZigBee-based ECG and pulse oximetry sensors are imple- robustness, fault tolerance, massive scalability, interoperabil-
mented by the authors, and the results showed that ZigBee ity, and energy efficiency. Reliability against interference is
meets the QoS requirements for these healthcare applications. highly indispensable because industries encompass several
Coexistence is also important in healthcare applications due wireless networks, heavy machinery, and co-located com-
to the WiFi-enabled smartphones that are operating close to munication systems that can interfere with IWSNs [246].
the wireless technologies such as ZigBee. In [243], the impact This can negatively impact wireless connectivity and result
of WiFi near the ZigBee wearables has been analyzed. in link unreliability issues. Besides, most low-power wireless
Although 6LoWPAN and ZigBee share the same PHY standards operate in the ISM band which can make them
and MAC, the IPv6 capability of 6LoWPAN makes the highly vulnerable to interference. Certain applications in
devices addressable via the Internet. This allows for the industries, such as closed-loop control systems are extremely
opportunity to remotely monitor health conditions or keep delaying sensitive. They tend to require low latency so that the
VOLUME 6, 2018 67917

TABLE 8. Different classes of industrial applications as defined by ISA. 1) ZIGBEE

ZigBee offers low power consumption. It supports several
topologies that make it suitable for industrial monitoring and
control. However, it is unable to provide high reliability and
robustness [248].
ZigBee does not employ any frequency-agility protection
against interference and fading effects. Moreover, the static
nature of the channel will create a bottleneck for ZigBee com-
munication if other wireless LANs operate in close proximity.
This also impacts the delay and energy consumption because
frequent packet losses will cause retransmissions, which will
lead to an increase in delay and energy consumption. Zig-
control system can function smoothly. Furthermore, low Bee uses IEEE 802.15.4 MAC, which renders the delay to
power IWSNs have limited battery resources. When the be unbounded (cf Section III-C). This causes problems for
devices run out of battery life and die, it leads to network real-time transmission, especially for control applications in
failures. Therefore, the network needs to be fault tolerant process automation.
so that failure of one device or a group of devices does not
cause the entire network to fail. Scalability is also a chal- 2) WIRELESSHART
lenge with wireless networks. The industries require dense WirelessHART is developed to cater to monitoring and con-
networks that consist of hundreds and thousands of nodes. trol in industries. It improves upon the drawbacks of ZigBee.
Efficient and fair distribution of limited resources in such The standard is robust and provides secure communication by
dense networks causes trade-off complexities for several per- implementing features such as channel hopping and channel
formance metrics. As time passes, certain devices and func- blacklisting in order to avoid interference. In the case of
tionalities are removed, and new ones may be added. This transmission failures, retransmission occurs on a different
requires the network to be scalable enough to accommodate channel. This improves reliability in harsh industrial environ-
such changes without compromising performance. Currently, ments. It supports mesh networking together with graph rout-
wired networks are already prevalent in industries and used ing, which offers path redundancy and self-healing features
to support many processes and operations. The use of new that help in case of broken links [248]. The MAC protocol
wireless standards and solutions should seamlessly work with works on TDMA and provides multiple features, as discussed
the legacy systems. This requires interoperability among the in Section 7.
standards and solutions. The standard employs a dedicated security manager, which
Table 8 shows the different classes of industrial applica- implements the necessary encryption and security policies.
tions, ranging from process monitoring, control, safety, and Although WirelessHART is suitable in many aspects com-
emergency operations as defined by ISA [37]. The traffic pared to ZigBee, it lacks public key encryption and the ability
categories are listed according to traffic priority with 0 as to connect to other networks without a gateway [249].
the highest priority traffic and 5 as the lowest priority traffic.
Each application category generates a different kind of data
traffic. In comparison to user-generated traffic on the Internet, 3) IEEE 802.15.4E
the traffic generated by the industrial applications has differ- IEEE 802.15.4e defines six MAC modes. In particular, its
ent characteristics. TSCH MAC mode is important because it implements a
Most of the processes in industries are periodic in nature, deterministic TDMA mechanism and has channel hopping
meaning that they do not require frequent data transmission. features in order to avoid the inevitable interference. The
The long idle periods in between data transmission makes MAC protocol is multi-channel and offers many improve-
lower power networks more suitable in comparison to tradi- ments as discussed in Section III-E3. Although TSCH offers
tional cellular or next generation wireless networks. high reliability for industrial automation, it lacks a schedul-
Essentially, the industrial environment is heterogeneous ing entity to compute the schedule of nodes based on the
as shown in Table 9, i.e., certain traffic is an extremely traffic requirements of the application. TSCH defines the
high priority, while the other requires less priority. The high schedule, but how the schedule is built and maintained is
priority traffic requires immediate response to certain events, unknown.
i.e., they need the right response at the right time, other- Furthermore, 6TiSCH and 6LoWPAN standards emerged
wise, the system can run into catastrophic situations. Below, in order to provide an IP network that is capable of enabling
we discuss some of the well-known low power standards low-power wireless standards as discussed in Section III-
and technologies developed over the years that promise to G and Section III-H, respectively. In this way, they pro-
fulfill the requirements of industrial automation and help to mote interoperability among the latest and the traditional
realize IIoT. IP networks.
67918 VOLUME 6, 2018

TABLE 9. Industrial applications and their typical requirements (source: [18], [247]).
depends on the networking connectivity, which demands

high reliability, availability, low latency, and, at the same
time, satisfies the requirements of all levels of applications.
The major barrier is the interoperability among the several
heterogeneous technologies to be able to work together to
achieve a common goal. In such a scenario, providing reliable
connectivity is a huge challenge not only because of the
coexistence of a large number of devices that comply with
different technologies but also because these devices can
face severe interference. In such scenarios, impaired network
connectivity can result in catastrophic situations for the wide
variety of offered services and applications.
FIGURE 20. Comparison of major applications based on the number of
connected devices in smart cites (source: [250]).
In looking at the requirements that are defined by the
smart cities, low-power standards, such as ZigBee, Bluetooth,
D. SMART CITY IEEE 802.11ah, NFC, and Z-Wave, can fulfill their demands,
The concept of a smart city envisions a city where information but they are unable to provide high throughput and extended
and communication technologies offer viable solutions to transmission range [255]. Furthermore, the advanced tech-
collect, analyze, and smartly distributes information in order nologies, such as 3GPP, WiMAX, LTE, and LTE-Advanced,
to transform the services offered to the citizens, enhance are not suitable due to their high power consumption because
operational efficiency, and help the public administration most of the smart city applications require small sensors that
make better decisions [251], [252]. One of the promising will be deployed everywhere and run on batteries. In order to
projects for a smart city is the Smart Santander Project [50], realize the smart city concepts, low-power standards have to
conducted in the Spanish port city, Santander. It proposes promote interoperability. A massive number of devices will
a smart city where sensors, actuators, cameras, and screens be installed and need to work together efficiently, so scalable
are deployed around the city to help citizens better utilize protocols are necessary.
information [253]. The smart city promises to manage and
optimize the plethora of public services, such as monitoring X. RELATED SURVEYS
structural health, air quality and noise, as well as traffic There exist various survey papers that discuss the char-
management, smart parking, managing city energy consump- acteristics, technologies, standards, and applications of
tion, waste management, smart lighting, and the automa- IoT [21], [256]–[259]. Unfortunately, these studies did not
tion of public buildings [254]. This vision can be realized cover the recent wireless technologies and their suitability for
by utilizing the telecommunication infrastructure, as well each IoT application. In particular, a comprehensive study
as several technologies like as WSN, M2M, and Vehicular on MAC and PHY layers in these technologies is missing.
to Vehicular (V2V) communication. A smart city integrates A recent study in [257] focuses on exploring the network
several emerging technologies with existing information and architectures of IoT. The authors discuss the classification
communication infrastructure in order to exhibit the suc- of IoT architectures and outline future architectural require-
cessful evolution of IoT. The environment is heterogeneous, ments. However, the paper does not cover aspects such
i.e., it encompasses different types of devices and generates as low-power standardization or well-known infrastructure
different types of data traffic. Such an environment vastly protocols for IoT. Another survey in [21] provides an
VOLUME 6, 2018 67919

excellent, holistic discussion of IoT with respect to its archi- For instance, Gomez et al. [107] and Darroudi and
tecture, common standards, elements, technologies, infras- Gomez [264] review the BLE standard from a protocol stack
tructure protocols, applications, and market opportunities. point of view and research to provide a BLE mesh network,
It is more of a general overview of the various aspects respectively. On the other hand, surveys like [67], [265],
of IoT, however, it does not cover the in-depth technical and [266] only focus on IEEE 802.15.4 based standards.
details, pitfalls, and limitations of MAC protocols of low- Blanckenstein et al. [267] reviewed low-power transceivers
power standards. The survey paper in [258] provides a sound and suitability for each application. However, due to the
analysis of recent advances in IoT. The authors focus the novelty of technologies like BLE 5, they did not cover the
paper on the standardized protocol stack and examine the latest transceivers. Additionally, the survey only reviews the
IETF standardization efforts and protocols. The paper pro- hardware requirements for low-power networks.
vides a profound, technical discussion on the application,
MAC, routing and transport layers, as well as low-power XI. CONCLUSION
radio characteristics. However, it does not cover their appli- Emerging IoT applications impose several constraints in
cability and limitations in different IoT application domains. terms of reliability, timeliness, scalability, and energy effi-
The IoT survey paper in [256] examines the IETF current ciency. The purpose of our study was to provide a thor-
standards and protocols and explores open questions, limita- ough discussion about existing low-power wireless standards,
tions, opportunities, and future challenges. However, it dis- technologies, and protocols, and examine their suitability in
cusses only the defacto standards. Besides, some surveys diverse IoT application domains. We presented the require-
focus on a single IoT application and its requirements as ments of different applications such as smart healthcare,
well as the suitability of each wireless technology for it. For industrial automation, and smart cities, and analyzed the
example, Yuehong et al. [229] explored the application of IoT potentials of existing standards in meeting such requirements.
in health care. The study provides a general overview of a Our survey focused on the PHY and MAC layers because
system architecture for IoT-based smart health care. It is a they directly influence the aforementioned constraints. In our
general overview, and the specific requirements for applica- attempt to explore their suitability, we highlighted several
tions are not mentioned. Similarly, Domingo [260] studied drawbacks of the MAC protocols. We also discussed the
the research trend to improve the quality of life for individuals interference issue among the coexisting, low-power wireless
with disabilities. The study shows the possible solutions to networks, which is a major challenge that degrades the net-
overcome the limitations of some disabilities by using con- work performance for reliability and latency. We analyzed
nected sensors and positioning technologies. The adaptability how the inherent schemes employed by the standards cope
of optimal wireless technology for each scenario has been with the interference issues.
reviewed as well. The study lacks a larger pool of individuals Lastly, we presented the application domains of the IoT and
and ignores the challenge of providing a low-power network. the requirements for each scenario. Additionally, we intro-
In [261] WBANs for medical and non-medical applications duced the optimal wireless solution for each application
have been reviewed. The authors explained the uniqueness based on the demands.
of this network because of the high mobility and placement
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
of some sensors inside the human body. The scope of this
is limited to the WBANs, and challenges, such as the coex- (Ali Nikoukar and Saleem Raza contributed equally to this
istence of the wireless network, have not been taken into work.)
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VOLUME 6, 2018 67925

[262] M. Alaa, A. A. Zaidan, B. B. Zaidan, M. Talal, and M. L. M. Kiah, ‘‘A ANGELINA POOLE received the bachelor’s
review of smart home applications based on Internet of Things,’’ J. Netw. degree in computer science and engineering from
Comput. Appl., vol. 97, pp. 48–65, Nov. 2017. Santa Clara University in 2018. She is currently
[263] U. Raza, P. Kulkarni, and M. Sooriyabandara, ‘‘Low power wide area pursuing the master’s degree in computer science
networks: An overview,’’ IEEE Commun. Surveys Tuts., vol. 19, no. 2, with the University of California at Los Angeles,
pp. 855–873, 2nd Quart., 2017. Los Angeles, CA, USA. At Santa Clara University,
[264] S.-M. Darroudi and C. Gomez, ‘‘Bluetooth low energy mesh networks: A she was a Research Assistant with the Internet
survey,’’ Sensors, vol. 17, no. 7, p. 1467, Jul. 2017.
of Things Laboratory under the supervision of
[265] R. T. Hermeto, A. Gallais, and F. Theoleyre, ‘‘Scheduling for
Dr. B. Dezfouli.
IEEE802.15.4-TSCH and slow channel hopping MAC in low power
industrial wireless networks: A survey,’’ Comput. Commun., vol. 114,
pp. 84–105, Dec. 2017.
[266] P. Baronti, P. Pillai, V. W. C. Chook, S. Chessa, A. Gotta, and
Y. F. Hu, ‘‘Wireless sensor networks: A survey on the state of the art and
the 802.15.4 and ZigBee standards,’’ Comput. Commun., vol. 30, no. 7,
pp. 1655–1695, 2007. MESUT GÜNEŞ received the M.Sc. equivalent
[267] J. Blanckenstein, J. Klaue, and H. Karl, ‘‘A survey of low-power diploma degree in computer science and the Ph.D.
transceivers and their applications,’’ IEEE Circuits Syst. Mag., vol. 15, degree from RWTH Aachen University, Germany,
no. 3, pp. 6–17, 3rd Quart., 2015. in 1998 and 2004, respectively. From 2004 to
2005, he was a Research Fellow at the Interna-
ALI NIKOUKAR received the master’s degree tional Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA,
in computer science from University Technol- USA. He was a Professor in distributed embedded
ogy Malaysia in 2014. He is currently pursu- systems at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, from
ing the Ph.D. degree with the Communication 2007 and to 2014. From 2014 to 2016, he was a
and Networked Systems Research Group, Otto Professor in communication and networked sys-
von Guericke University Magdeburg, Magdeburg, tems at the University of Münster, Germany. He has been a Full Professor at
Germany (awarded by DAAD scholarship). His the Faculty of Computer Science, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg,
research area mainly focuses on low-power wire- Magdeburg, Germany, since 2016. His research interests include distributed
less networks, in particular, the applications of communication systems, Internet of Things, wired and wireless computer
deep-learning in cognitive radio networks and the networks particularly wireless sensor networks, wireless mesh networks, and
Internet of things. mobile ad-hoc networks. He is involved in several national and international
research projects in the mentioned areas.
BEHNAM DEZFOULI received the Ph.D. degree

in computer science from University Technology
SALEEM RAZA received the bachelor’s degree in Malaysia in 2014. He is currently an Assistant
electronic engineering and the master’s degree in Professor at the Department of Computer Engi-
electronic systems engineering from the Mehran neering, Santa Clara University (SCU), USA.
University of Engineering and Technology, Before joining SCU, he was a Post-Doctoral
Pakistan, in 2006 and 2012, respectively. He is Research Scientist and a Vising Assistant Profes-
currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the Com- sor at The University of Iowa, USA, from 2015 to
munication and Networked Systems Research 2016. He served as a Post-Doctoral Research Fel-
Group, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, low and a Research Fellow with University Tech-
Magdeburg, Germany. During his Master studies, nology Malaysia, and the Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore, from
he received the Erasmus Mundus Mobility for Life 2014 to 2012, respectively. He is currently the PI of several IoT related
scholarship for a research stay at Aalborg University, Denmark, where he projects funded by Cypress Semiconductor, City of San Jose, and Santa
studied subjects on communication and broadcast networks, entrepreneur- Clara Valley Water District. His research interests include Internet of Things,
ship innovation and business models, and information and communication cyber-physical systems, and wireless software-defined networking. He is an
technologies. His research area mainly focuses on wireless communication, Associate Editor of the IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS journal.
wireless sensor networks, and the Internet of things.
67926 VOLUME 6, 2018

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Received August 13, 2018, accepted October 11, 2018, date of publication November 9, 2018, date of current version

Low-Power Wireless for the Internet of Things:

by utilizing ubiquitous computing, networking technologies, TABLE 1. Abbreviations.

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– We discuss and analyze several low-power wireless II. STANDARDIZATION BODIES

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ETSI standards. Currently, ETSI has 800 member organiza-

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channel if there is at least one sample less than the noise

the radio transceiver may operate in one of the three states:

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Studies in [67] show that the selection of the binary expo-

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(DSME-GTSs), which are used to transmit time-critical data.

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However, in order to make the network scalable up to

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2) PHY AND MAC LAYERS

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connect sensors, actuators, controllers, and critical wireless

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FIGURE 10. A sample of Bluetooth scatternet formation. Although

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Advertisement channels are used for various purposes, such

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FIGURE 15. BLE 4.2 and 5 (LE1M, LE2M) packet format.

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TABLE 3. Bluetooth 5 support SoC comparison.

and increases the throughput by doubling the modulation rate.

as shown in Figure 16 although the packet size in v5 2 Mbps

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TABLE 4. Comparison of Bluetooth Standards.

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of using the entire allocated bandwidth, making it resistant

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buildings [182]. In 2016, the global market for smart homes

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TABLE 7. QoS requirements for smart healthcare (sources: [225]–[227]).

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TABLE 8. Different classes of industrial applications as defined by ISA. 1) ZIGBEE

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depends on the networking connectivity, which demands

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BEHNAM DEZFOULI received the Ph.D. degree

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