Enabling Direct Messaging from LoRa to ZigBee in the 2.4 GHz Band for Industrial Wireless Networks

摘要

IEEE 802.15.4-based wireless sensor-actuator networks (WSANs) have been quickly adopted by process industries in recent years because of their significant role in improving industrial efficiency and reducing operating cost. Battery-powered wireless modules can be used to easily and inexpensively retrofit existing sensors and actuators in industrial facilities without running cabling for communication and power. Wireless-enabled sensors, actuators, and controllers form a low-power multi-hop mesh network to exchange sensing data and control commands. Today, industrial WSANs are becoming tremendously larger and more complex than before. A large and complex mesh network is hard to manage and inelastic to change once the network is deployed. Besides, flooding-based time synchronization and information dissemination introduce significant communication overhead to the network. More importantly, the deliveries of urgent and critical information such as emergency alarms suffer long delay, because those messages must go through the hop-by-hop transport. A promising solution to overcome those limitations is to enable the direct messaging from a long-range radio to an IEEE 802.15.4 radio. Then messages can be delivered to all field devices in a single-hop fashion. This paper presents our study on enabling the cross-technology communication (CTC) from LoRa to ZigBee (IEEE 802.15.4) using the energy emission of the LoRa radio in the 2.4 GHz band as the carrier to deliver information. Experimental results show that our CTC approach provides reliable communication from LoRa to ZigBee with the throughput of up to 576.80bps and the bit error rate (BER) of up to 5.23% in the 2.4 GHz band.