Evaluation And Improvement Of Collection Tree Protocol For TDMA-based Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Nowadays wireless sensor networks have been widely deployed in industrial environments in order to reduce the operating costs. The corresponding wireless networking standards have also emerged in recent years. The most widely applied standard in an industrial WSN (wireless sensor network) is the WirelessHART (Highway Addressable Remote Transducer) which is a variant of Hart with a simple, reliable and secure wireless communication between wireless devices for automated process plant industries. However, WirelessHART does not provide a clear strategy in relation to dynamic routing, which is important for the reliability and robustness of the industrial wireless network applications. In this Master's thesis a mechanism has been proposed, by evaluating and improving the CTP (Collection Tree Protocol) to make it work as a solution to the dynamic routing mechanism in a TDMA-based industrial wireless sensor network. This mechanism was implemented on TOSSIM, a discrete event simulator which can compile a TinyOS application into the TOSSIM framework instead of compiling it for a mote. The evaluation of this mechanism is mainly concerned with three aspects:the time relating to generating topology, the link quality and the stability of the topology. Through these three aspects, the rationality of this design is apparent.