Separation of Control and Data Planes (SCDP) is a desirable paradigm for low-power multi-hop wireless sensor networks requiring high network performance and manageability. Existing SCDP networks generally adopt an in-band control plane scheme in that the control-plane messages are delivered by their data-plane networks. The physical coupling of the two planes may lead to undesirable consequences. Recently, multi-radio platforms (e.g., TI CC1350 and OpenMote B) are increasingly available, which make the physical separation of the control and data planes possible. To advance the network architecture design, we propose to leverage on the long-range communication capability of the Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) radios to form one-hop out-of-band control planes. LoRaWAN, an open, inexpensive, and ISM band based LPWAN radio, is chosen to prototype our out-of-band control plane called LoRaCP. Several characteristics of LoRaWAN such as downlink-uplink asymmetry and primitive ALOHA media access control need to be dealt with to achieve high reliability and efficiency. To address these challenges, a TDMA-based multi-channel transmission control is designed, which features an urgent channel and negative acknowledgment. On a testbed of 16 nodes, LoRaCP is applied to physically separate the control-plane network of the Collection Tree Protocol (CTP) from its Zigbee-based data-plane network. Extensive experiments show that LoRaCP increases CTP’s packet delivery ratio from 65% to 80% in the presence of external interference, while consuming a per-node average radio power of 2.97mW only.

中文翻译：

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多跳无线传感器网络的单跳带外控制平面

控制和数据平面分离 (SCDP) 是需要高网络性能和可管理性的低功耗多跳无线传感器网络的理想范例。现有的 SCDP 网络一般采用带内控制平面方案，其中控制平面消息由其数据平面网络传递。两个平面的物理耦合可能导致不良后果。最近，多无线电平台（例如，TI CC1350 和 OpenMote B）越来越多，这使得控制和数据平面的物理分离成为可能。为了推进网络架构设计，我们建议利用低功耗广域网 (LPWAN) 无线电的远程通信能力来形成单跳带外控制平面。LoRaWAN 是一种开放、廉价且基于 ISM 频段的 LPWAN 无线电，被选为我们称为 LoRaCP 的带外控制平面的原型。需要处理 LoRaWAN 的几个特性，例如下行链路-上行链路不对称和原始 ALOHA 媒体访问控制，以实现高可靠性和高效率。为了应对这些挑战，设计了一种基于TDMA的多通道传输控制，该控制具有紧急通道和否定确认的特点。在 16 个节点的测试平台上，LoRaCP 被应用于物理上将收集树协议 (CTP) 的控制平面网络与其基于 Zigbee 的数据平面网络分开。大量实验表明，在存在外部干扰的情况下，LoRaCP 将 CTP 的数据包传输率从 65% 提高到 80%，而每个节点的平均无线电功率仅为 2.97mW。