To support the growth of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications, the networks themselves must also scale and they need to provide wire-like reliability. Dust Networks understands the significance of ensuring that the overall network performance must improve as more nodes are added. SmartMesh networks are purpose-built for reliability and scalability.

All SmartMesh networks are based on a Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) media access layer (MAC). TSCH works by dividing up the 16 available IEEE 802.15.4 wireless channels into timeslots, each of which can be used for packet transmission. TSCH-based motes also have a common sense of time with sub-millisecond accuracy, as well as a manager-coordinated communications schedule so they know precisely when to talk, listen, or sleep. Communication can be scheduled with the assurance that transactions have no chance of interfering with each other.

The same network-wide synchronization can also be used to enable pair-wise channel hopping (frequency diversity), which confers a number of benefits to SmartMesh networks. First, it increases the network bandwidth because multiple transmissions can occur simultaneously on different channels. Second, reliability is dramatically improved because each mote can communicate on all potentially good channels, which avoids motes getting stranded by channels that have become unreliable. Third, since multipath interference is frequency-dependent, more available channels increases the effective range of each radio. Lastly, channel hopping makes TSCH more robust to interference and reduces the impact on other wireless networks.

SmartMesh networks are among the most reliable networks- even better than wired systems, in some cases, since a backhoe is unlikely to sever a wireless link. From a reliability perspective, it is also important to note that the SmartMesh manager can be deployed in a redundant mode, providing failover capabilities to a standby manager.