Experimental prototype study for 868 MHz 6TiSCH-based smart meter reading

Aydın H., Aydın B., Tunç D., Görmüş S.

Gümüşhane Üniversitesi Fen Bilimleri Dergisi, cilt.16, sa.3, ss.802-816, 2026 (TRDizin)

Özet

Smart grid Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) requires scalable, reliable, and regulation-compliant wireless communication for periodic remote meter readings. Although IEEE 802.15.4-based 6TiSCH networks have been widely studied, most existing implementations operate in the congested 2.4 GHz band, where interference and limited indoor penetration constrain reliability. In this study, we propose and experimentally validate an ETSI EN 300 220 compliant 6TiSCH framework operating in the 868 MHz sub-GHz band. The proposed framework explicitly incorporates per-sub-band duty-cycle and Effective Radiated Power (ERP) limits into the 6TiSCH operation, introduces a link-quality- and distance-aware sub-band assignment mechanism, and selectively enables or disables frequency hopping according to a per-sub-band link-budget evaluation. The system is implemented on Contiki-NG and deployed on real IEEE 802.15.4g hardware using the CC1312R1-based Umote platform. A comparative two-device prototype evaluation against a 2.4 GHz Mahmote testbed, carried out under indoor non-line-of-sight conditions, shows that the proposed 868 MHz configuration achieves a MAC-layer Packet Delivery Ratio of approximately 96.6%, compared with approximately 91.2% for the 2.4 GHz baseline, while reducing the MAC-layer drop ratio from approximately 0.073 to 0.035. These results indicate that the proposed sub-band-aware 6TiSCH framework provides improved link reliability, reduced retransmission overhead, and better acknowledgment efficiency, while remaining fully compliant with ETSI regulatory constraints. Within the scope of a single-hop prototype validation, the framework offers a practical pathway toward energy-aware, spectrum-compliant 868 MHz smart metering deployments in European AMI scenarios.