@inproceedings{Groh2101:Interference,

title = {Interference resilience of Thread: A practical performance evaluation},

author = {Andreas I. {Grohmann} and David {Nophut} and Marek {Sobe} and Adrian {Bretschneider} and Frank H. P. {Fitzek}},

year  = {2021},

date = {2021-01-09},

booktitle = {2021 IEEE 18th Annual Consumer Communications \& Networking Conference 

(CCNC) (CCNC 2021)},

address = {Las Vegas, USA},

abstract = {Currently, most IoT services are hosted centralized 

in a cloud. However, they rely on data gathered by numerous 

distributed sensors, which require to be connected to these clouds. 

At the moment this is realized with non-IP based proprietary 

wireless sensor networks that use inflexible networking concepts 

and require to be carefully configured. 

The Thread protocol, with its implementation OpenThread, is 

a new wireless mesh approach to solve this problem. OpenThread 

is maintained by the Thread group, which is an organization 

supported by almost 300 companies, including Google, Amazon, 

and Apple. Its design is based on an IPv6, for seamless integration 

in existing IP networks. 

This work, after a short a practical overview of the Thread 

protocol in general, investigates the network performance in 

different interference scenarios based on results from a hardware 

testbed, set up in an office building. This testbed is based on 

the Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 System on a Chip (SoC), 

running OpenThread from the official github repository. Besides 

a thorough examination for round-trip-time (RTT) and losses, a 

stability test was performed over five weeks, to see the impact 

of interference during business hours. We measured RTTs in 

the range of 10 to 100 ms and losses up to 40% depending 

on interfering wireless services. Despite its obvious advantages, 

from our experimental results, it is evident how some practical 

limitations make OpenThread not always a good choice.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}