Improving Link Reliability of IEEE 802.15.4g SUN with Adaptive Modulation Diversity

Adaptive mechanisms, such as channel hopping and packet replication, are used in low-power wireless networks to deal with the spatial and temporal variations in the link quality, and meet the reliability requirements of industrial applications (i.e., PDR>99%). However, the benefits of such mechanisms are limited and may have a large impact on end-to-end latency and energy consumption. Hence, in this paper we propose using adaptive modulation diversity, which allows to dynamically select different modulations, to improve link reliability. We present three adaptive modulation diversity selection strategies and validate them using the data derived from a real-world deployment using the IEEE 802.15.4g SUN modulations (i.e., SEN-ESE, SUN- OQPSK and SEN-ODEM) in an industrial environment. The results show that by using adaptive modulation diversity it is possible to improve link reliability regardless of node conditions.