This week I worked on the RX/TX schedule distribution phase of the protocol stack. Once the gateway router has a complete view of the sensor network topology (i.e after the LSA phase is complete), it calculates a node transmission schedule based on this topology. At the moment, the gateway is being run on an STM32, so an objective for next week is to port the code over from the STM to the RPI, using an external UART library to interface with the LoRa transceivers. Once the gateway router has calculated the schedule, it iteratively sends the schedule out to its children. Unfortunately, due to materials constraints, we have only been able to test these three out of four protocol phases on a network of 4 nodes, and more complications may arise when testing with 8 nodes. We are slightly behind schedule, and using slack-time. For this next week, I will work on:
- implementing ACKs for the schedule distribution phase of the routing protocol, in order to avoid packet collisions (which will arise in an 8-node topology)
- porting the code for the GW node from the STM32 platform to the RPI