Achieving deterministic and low-latency wireless connection with zero-wire

Abstract

Despite the ubiquitous deployment and development of wireless technology for the Internet of Things (IoT), contemporary radio frequency (RF)-based solutions still cannot match the performance of a "wire" in terms of latency and throughput. This abstract presents a demonstration of Zero-Wire, a novel optical wireless approach that addresses this gap to enable latency-sensitive IoT applications. The essence of this approach is a new networking paradigm, referred to as a symbol-synchronous bus, wherein a mesh of nodes concurrently transmits optical signals. The demonstration setup is composed of 25 Zero-Wire nodes, forming a mesh network, and the demo showcases the network's behavior during a series of transmissions. End-to-end performance measurements include 19 kbps of contention-agnostic goodput, latency under 1 ms for two-byte frames, jitter on the order of 10s of µs, and a base reliability of 99%.

Zero-Wire

“…As shown in Figure 1, symbol-synchronous buses reduce latency and jitter by parallelising retransmissions between source and destination nodes as much as possible. More precisely, relay nodes forward a symbol immediately after observing it, which means that transmitted symbols quickly move away from the node that initiated their transmission in a wave-like fashion [8].…”