Energy efficient M2M communications for aerospace monitoring applications

Traditional aerospace testing and monitoring systems are based on point-to-point analog wiring, which results in bulky and heavy cables, difficult installation and maintenance and a limited number of sensors. Switching to wireless would alleviate these constraints but creates new challenges due to the high data rates, transfer reliability requirements and energy constraints. Indeed, with sensor counts ranging from a hundred to a thousand of sensors, data rates can reach several hundred megabits per second and there can be as many as several hundred network nodes communicating on the different wireless channels. Although in this application the network is static, the challenge comes from real-time and reliable communication requirements. There is also a strong need for energy efficient machine to machine communications as each node is powered from a battery or from energy harvesting. This paper describes a machine to machine wireless communications architecture tailored for this purpose, based on a low power Impulse Radio Ultra Wide Band (IR-UWB) physical layer and an energy efficient MAC layer. This paper describes the design and implementation of the physical and MAC layers which allows a high reconfigurability in terms of data rate, number of nodes, communication range and spectrum occupation. Both design-time and run-time reconfigurability at the MAC layer allows to further reduce the power requirements by tailoring the network interface properties to the specific needs of the application, such as the bit rate, the transmission power, the wireless channel and the number of network nodes.