A MAC Layer Protocol For Smart Indoor Inventory Management System
The indoor inventory system is gaining more research attention and commercial value with the development of IoT. In this thesis, we presented the design of a MAC protocol that allows synchronized transmission of location and sensing data in a wireless positioning and sensor network for an indoor inventory system. The network supports real-life industrial applications and provides a highly specific positioning method.<div>In the network, mobile sensing tags are connected to smart readers that performs localization of tags and gathers sensing data from the tags. The readers are connected to the back-end cloud. The proposed MAC serves multiple classes of mobile tags with different priorities and latency requirements. These tags transmit critical, position and sensing data with different QoS requirements. The proposed MAC is a hybrid MAC that offers contention-based period for tag discovery and scheduled period for the transmission of sensing data with guaranteed latency. We conducted simulation to evaluate the performance of different methods of discovery process and their impact on latency assurance. We also developed a queuing model to analyze the relationship between parameters, acquiring parameters through experiment, and calculation of boundary values.<br></div><div>Simulation using MatLabTM software suggests that the joining period in design can increase the transmission success rate of high priority messages at the cost of a slight increment in the delay of low priority messages. Preliminary analysis suggests that by adaptively allocating the channel resources of the network to three types of tags, service efficiency can be improved. This result also guides the direction for further improvement.<br></div><div>We explored the performance of two options considered currently, which is selecting the discovery process according to modulo result of unique 16-bit tag ID and random select of an available discovery process. In the current environment where each tag does not have any information about other tags inside the network, the two methods have the same effect on avoiding collisions that could happen in a single discovery cycle.<br></div><div>The proposed MAC layer protocol can provide the best service when the available discovery process in the discovery cycle is for initialization and resetting. For an emergency, the joining period designs can still ensure a success rate for critical messages to be over 90%. Hence, the simulation results indicate the joining period method is able to improve MAC-layer performance.</div><div> <br></div>