David Carels

IETF Standardization in the Field of the Internet of Things (IoT): A Survey

Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there have been many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices. Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized IP-based protocols. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, followed by an extensive overview of IETF standardization work in the 6LoWPAN, ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is complemented with a broad overview of related research results that illustrate how this work can be extended or used to tackle other problems and with a discussion on open issues and challenges. As such the aim of this paper is twofold: apart from giving readers solid insights in IETF standardization work on the Internet of Things, it also aims to encourage readers to further explore the world of Internet-connected objects, pointing to future research opportunities.

Support of multiple sinks via a virtual root for the RPL routing protocol

Data acquisition in large wireless sensor networks consisting of only a single sink can typically lead to scalability and energy efficiency issues. A solution to this problem is the deployment of multiple sinks in the network. This approach is however not supported by the popular sensor network routing protocol, IPv6 routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL). This paper describes a method to support the usage of multiple sinks for RPL in accordance to the limited guidelines of RPL: IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RFC 6550). Hereby this paper shows that the concept of a virtual root can work and can be implemented with a minimal complexity. The correct behaviour of this extension was verified, by performance tests, in both a simulation environment and a real-life environment (iMinds wiLab.t office testbed). The chosen approach has the advantage that for an existing deployment of a RPL network, only the sink nodes need to be adapted. The results confirm that the use of multiple sinks in RPL can deliver the desired advantages. For an increase in the number of sinks from 1 to 4, a decrease of about 45% in the maximal and more than 30% in the average energy consumption was obtained in simulations for the used topology. For the real-life tests, the average energy consumption decreased with more than 30% and with more than 50% for the maximal energy consumption when the number of sinks was increased from 1 to 2 on the iMinds wiLab.t office testbed. By using a positioning algorithm to determine the optimal position, for the sinks, possibly even better performances can be obtained.

RPL mobility support for point-to-point traffic flows towards mobile nodes

The “routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks” (RPL) from the IETF ROLL working group is a widely used standard to support routing in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Although the RPL protocol was originally designed with static topologies in mind, recently a number of extensions have been proposed to support traffic flows from mobile nodes towards a static gateway. However, this paper demonstrates that these solutions do not support traffic flows going the other direction, for example, from the gateway towards mobile devices. To remedy this, the paper first analyses the problems that prevent reliable traffic flows towards mobile devices when using RPL. Afterwards, a new mechanism to improve downward route updating is proposed. Our new approach minimizes the probability of connectivity loss by ensuring that the internal state of the static network remains consistent. Our solution is implemented and evaluated using both simulation tools and experimental facilities and it is shown that it improves the end-to-end packet delivery ratio to mobile nodes from 20–30% up to 80% while reducing the overall RPL signalling overhead without the use of location information.

Leveraging upon standards to build the Internet of Things

Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there were many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices. Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized IP-based protocols. Long time, most efforts were focusing on the networking layer. More recently, the IETF CoRE working group started working on an embedded counterpart of HTTP, allowing the integration of constrained devices into existing service networks. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, with a prime focus on the IETF standardization work in the ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is further complemented with some research results that illustrate how these novel technologies can be extended or used to tackle other problems.

An Evaluation of Link Estimation Algorithms for RPL in Dynamic Wireless Sensor Networks

Link estimators are extremely important in dynamic wireless sensor networks for obtaining a good network performance because they drive the decisions made by the routing protocol. Many estimators exist but the quality of their estimation depends on the scenario at hand. In this paper, the impact of the estimator on the network performance is investigated in different networking scenarios. Also the influence of the underlying MAC protocol was evaluated. The evaluation was performed both in simulation and on a real-life testbed.

Impact of introducing road charging on supporting mobile data networks

This paper presents a model for assessing the impact of introducing nationwide road charging systems on supporting mobile data networks. It defines a model based on real traffic measurements, and establishes appropriate parameter values for capturing specific application characteristics such as the importance of data compression, truck-only versus all traffic charging, and dimensioning margins for handling peak days. Finally, this paper applies the developed model and defined parameter values to a Belgian case study.