OSF: An Open-Source Framework for Synchronous Flooding over Multiple Physical Layers

Abstract: Flooding protocols based on concurrent transmissions are regarded as the most reliable way to collect or disseminate data across a multi-hop low-power wireless mesh network. Recent works have shown that such protocols are effective for narrowband communication not only over IEEE 802.15.4, but also over the BLE 5 physical layers (PHYs). However, to date, existing literature has only built synchronous flooding solutions on top of a single PHY, and there has been no attempt to leverage different PHYs at runtime to increase performance. This paper fills this gap and presents OSF, an open-source framework that enables the design of multi-PHY synchronous flooding solutions thanks to a novel radio driver and middle-ware architecture capable of dynamically switching the underlying physical layer. This allows exploitation of the specific benefits of each PHY (e.g., higher data-rate, increased robustness) on-demand during each flood, increasing performance. We tailor OSF to the off-the-shelf nRF52840 platform, and showcase its benefits by comparing single-PHY and multi-PHY synchronous flooding solutions on a real-world testbed.