6TiSCH on SCμM: Running a Synchronized Protocol Stack without Crystals

We report the first time-synchronized protocol stack running on a crystal-free device. We use an early prototype of the Single-Chip micro Mote, SCμM, a single-chip 2 × 3 mm2 mote-on-a-chip, which features an ARM Cortex-M0 micro-controller and an IEEE802.15.4 radio. This prototype consists of an FPGA...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Chang, Tengfei, Watteyne, Thomas, Wheeler, Brad, Maksimovic, Filip, Khan, Osama, Mesri, Sahar, Lee, Lydia, Suciu, Ioana, Burnett, David C., Vilajosana, Xavier, Pister, Kris
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2020
País:España
Institución:Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC)
Repositorio:O2, repositorio institucional de la UOC
OAI Identifier:oai:openaccess.uoc.edu:10609/148564
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10609/148564
https://doi.org/10.3390/s20071912
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:crystal-free
6TiSCH
SCμM
smart dust
Descripción
Sumario:We report the first time-synchronized protocol stack running on a crystal-free device. We use an early prototype of the Single-Chip micro Mote, SCμM, a single-chip 2 × 3 mm2 mote-on-a-chip, which features an ARM Cortex-M0 micro-controller and an IEEE802.15.4 radio. This prototype consists of an FPGA version of the micro-controller, connected to the SCμM chip which implements the radio front-end. We port OpenWSN, a reference implementation of a synchronized protocol stack, onto SCμM. The challenge is that SCμM has only on-chip oscillators, with no absolute time reference such as a crystal. We use two calibration steps – receiving packets via the on-chip optical receiver and RF transceiver – to initially calibrate the oscillators on SCμM so that it can send frames to an off-the-shelf IEEE802.15.4 radio. We then use a digital trimming compensation algorithm based on tick skipping to turn a 567 ppm apparent drift into a 10 ppm drift. This allows us to run a full-featured standards-compliant 6TiSCH network between one SCμM and one OpenMote. This is a step towards realizing the smart dust vision of ultra-small and cheap ubiquitous wireless devices.