C-Labs S.r.l.

- Innovation in Wireless Technology

W ireless Intelligent N Etw ork

Abstract WINE is a patented technology, developed by C-Labs, that can be applied to SRDbased communication systems, when low-cost and low-power (that means batterypowered), are a must, as well as true two-way multipoint to point communication capabilities, between remote nodes and a base-station, battery-powered itself, and where every single node can receive data anytime, with some limitations, and not just send acknowledges to received frames. Applications Born to be a multipoint-to-point network topology, WINE doesn't exclude that informations could be shared between nodes with no relay on base-station and insert itself in the scape of sensor networks and lightweight wireless technologies for small and cost-conscious microncontroller-based applications, where batteries are often small-sized but longlife, may be several years, is required: telemetry, industrial and environmental supervisory, wireless security systems, home-automation, building-automations, etc. In particular, WINE can be applied where data traffic between nodes is quite small, with low data-rate an short-range coverage (20 Kbps, <300 m), but two-way secure, in terms of protection, data-flows are a need, or when substitution of cables with low bit-rate radio-links are possible or necessary. WINE main feature is two-way communication united with low-power, obtained by network synchronization in both time and frequency domains without any kind of beacon device to supply any timing base. Thank to an efficient and light communication protocol, remote network nodes sync their time-base (their clock) to base-station clock source. This approach allows two-way systems where also the base-station can be batterypowered, since no power-hungry periodic network synchronization are transmitted and media (air) access is as low as possible. System description System is built by several remote nodes and one base-station that set network time-base. Remote nodes and base station share the same hardware structure, with no care about their specific function: a micro-controller handles a radio subsystem and, in general, handles I/O capabilities. Referring to figure 1, radio hardware is controlled by CPU via digital and analog signals, that can be used to impose to radio sub-system the power-down (sleeping) state (minimal consumption, CPU switches off radio before sleep), the receiving (passive) state (CPU wakes up and switches on radio controlling Received Strength Signal Information level) and the transmitting (active) state (CPU forces radio to transmit).

W INE

T x Req T x En d
im T P ut e o
S T im

A c t iv e

P a ssiv e
ut

S le e p i n g

Figure 1 S tate transitio ns

State transitions are caused by timeouts (P_Timeout, S_Timeout) or by internal or external events (transmission requests or TxReq). Simultaneous passive-state for all nodes in network, defines a time-window where they can communicate Pagina 1 di 4

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C-Labs S.r.l. - Innovation in Wireless Technology (operating window). WINE uses SleepingPassive-Sleeping cycles of 1 second, where passive state is just 2 or 3 ms: radio is used (for receiving) with a duty-cycle of about 0.2%. To obtain two-way communication and low power, network nodes alternate receiving states with sleeping states (very low power) synchronously, firing-up receiving radio stage simultaneously on the same frequency. Time and frequencies synchronization domains network, a must for syncing tasks, that allows Point-to-Point connections, both real (Real-Link) and virtual (VirtualLink), with forward by base-station (figure 2). Figure 3 shows a WINE network operating both in time and frequencies domains, in case of passive windows only. Numbers in figure 3 are referred to a real

Time synchronization of network node has been obtained via a software postregulation applied on CPU clock source, a timer, computed from a little payload in ACK/SYNC frames (see protocol structure) sent from base-station to remote nodes. Relative precision between network nodes can reach easily 0.1 ppm or better. To improve immunity to random or intentional radio interference (radio-jam), WINE uses frequency-hopping techniques. The base-station during early sync phase (just after power-up) send a table of used frequencies, so each node can hop to the right frequency using the shared table. Use of frequency-hopping changes state transitions (fig. 1) of base-station: at the end of passive-state, just before sleepingstate, base-station jump to a particular frequency, the recovery channel, for a new passive state; a new or just fired-up node can request sync on recovery channel, resyncing itself over the network.
Node Node

Time /Frequencies Domains F1 F4 F8 F2

1s

2..3 ms

Figure 3

WINE application, a security system, where radio Texas Instruments TRF6900A base modules are working in the 868-870 MHz ISM band, where 9 channels are used. Current drawn from batteries is about 23 mA in passive state and about 85 mA in active state. Remote nodes, simple contacts and passive IR sensors, send a supervisory frame every 8 minutes (a kind of heartbeat). Using 2,2 Ah lithium 3V batteries, using WINE technology battery life can reach 3.5 years, and estimation is quite conservative.

R e a l L in k V ir t u al L in k B a s e S t a t io n

Node Node Fig ure 2 T o p o lo gy

Base station and remote nodes are part of a Master-Slave (Point-to-Multipont) 2004 C-Labs S.r.l. Pagina 2 di 4

C-Labs S.r.l. - Innovation in Wireless Technology Protocol structure Transmission protocol is a CSMA/CA version, where radio signal level (RSSI) is used to check for carrier presence (Carrier Sense).
Enc iphered data FEALnX
Header Control MAC Header Control and Variant Field

Src .Dst. Addr Sourc e/Dest Address Src .Dst.Type and devic e type Length Data Len Data CRC Reed-Solom Applic ation Data or Servic e Data 16 bit CRC Forward Error Correc tion

Figure 4

inserting a random delay before transmission (re)start. Protocol provide service frames (re-sync requests, ACKs, network parameters, etc.) and data frames, used to send states, commands and so on. The frame list is: 1. REQ_SYNC, request for sync, sent by nodes out of sync; 2. SYNC, answer to (1), sent from basestation to out of sync nodes; contains also the elapsed time from sleeping to passive state transition and current index in the frequencies table; 3. DATA, a generic data frame; 4. ACK, acknowledgment frame to (3); contains also the elapsed time from sleeping to passive state transition. As shown, protocol use just four different kind of frames, keeping the whole structure light and efficient. From the point of view of network synchronization, the elapsed time from sleeping to passive state transition, present in SYNC and ACK frames, is the only data used to provide clock postregulation to remote nodes.

As shown in figure 4, frames, independently from their specific purpose, are built using: Forward error corrector and integrity check (Reed-Solomon and CRC16); FEAL-nX (64 bits block-cipher) encryption used in CBC (Cipher-Block Chaining); Source and destination address; Source class. Except broadcast frames, each frames is repeated in case of absence of acknowledge from destination node,

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C-Labs S.r.l. - Innovation in Wireless Technology Conclusions Wine structure represents a new approach since it removes the need of a power-hungry beacon to sync the wireless network. Each node spend a little effort to adjust it's time base to a time reference (typically the base-station) using ACK frames, reaching an operating time-window where twoway communications are possible. True two-way communication capabilities let us to look at WINE more like a bus-based system than a wireless system, without battery-life penalties. The photo shows a Wine remote node designed for a wireless security system. Following table can be used to compare Wine with some other well known network technologies. WINE
Application focus System resource Battery life (days) Nodes per network Bandwidth (Kb/s) Range (meters) Radio Band (Mhz) Monitors controls 8 KB 1300+ 255/65535 20+ 200+ 434/868/915

ZigBee*
& Monitors controls 4...32 KB 100...1000 255 20...250 1...75+ 868/915/2400

Bluetooth*
& Cable replacement 250+ KB 1...7 7 720 1...10+ 2400

WiFi*
WEB, Video, Mail 1+ MB 0.1...5 30 11000 1...100 2400

Font: Zigbee Alliance

For more informations: Paolo Zebelloni <p.zebelloni@c-labs.it>

C-Labs S.r.l.
Hardware & Software Design
Environment Park Edificio A1 Laboratori Livello 2 Via Livorno 60 10144 Torino Tel. +39.011.225.7761 FAX +39.011.225.7769 E-Mail: info@c-labs.it WEB: www.c-labs.it

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