Timing delay characterization of GNU Radio based 802.15.4 network using LimeSDR

Abstract: Massive deployment of diverse ultra-low power wireless devices necessitates the rapid development of communication protocols. Software Defined Radio (SDR) provides a flexible platform for deploying and evaluating real-world performance of these protocols. But SDR platform based communication systems suffer from high and unpredictable delays. There is a lack of comprehensive understanding of the characteristics of the delays experienced by these systems for new SDR platforms like LimeSDR. This knowledge gap needs to be filled in order to reduce these delays and better design protocols which can take advantage of these platforms. We design a GNU Radio based IEEE 802.15.4 experimental setup, where the data path is time-stamped at various points of interest to get a comprehensive understanding of the characteristics of the delays. Our analysis shows GNU Radio processing and LimeSDR buffering delay are the major delays in these data paths. We try to decrease the LimeSDR buffering delay by decreasing the USB transfer size but it comes at the cost of increased processing overhead. The USB transfer packet size is modified to investigate which USB transfer size provides the best balance between buffering delay and the processing overhead across two different host computers. Our experiments show that for the best-measured configuration the mean and jitter of latency decreases by 37% and 40% respectively for the host computer with higher processing resources. We also show that the throughput is not affected by these modifications. Higher processing resources help in handling higher processing overhead and can better reduce the buffering delay.